A Trio of Serious Challenges

I can't get excited about the Oscars this year, even though my three favorite films of 2019 (Pain and Glory, 1917, Parasite) did really well on Oscar nomination morning. I feel beat down by the Internet's response to the Oscar nominations, and I feel extremely bored by The Irishman and Joker, two movies the Academy apparently loved. I am also hearing a lot of complaints about the Oscar nominations this year... and I find myself really bored by these complaints. Not that I disagree with these complaints per se. But the solutions I hear people offering have surprised me by not surprising me at all.

My Beloved J.Lo. I would have nominated you!

People want Greta Gerwig to have been nominated for Best Director, for Jennifer Lopez to have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress, for Taron Egerton to have been nominated for Best Actor. These suggestions have surprised me mostly because these three people in particular were probably very close to being nominated, and so what complainants are requesting is just a slight reshuffle at the top of the deck so that things look a little more diverse.

What people are not asking for is something interesting. In other words, I don't hear anyone complaining that Mati Diop or Céline Sciamma were passed over in the Best Director category or that Rob Morgan and Sterling K. Brown were ignored for Best Supporting Actor.

To put it another way, Academy voters are choosing between their favorites of the thirty movies that the studios told them were important and asked them to care about. They're watching the screeners they're sent and not thinking beyond that group of films. This is an abysmal state of affairs to be sure. But then all of these commentators on the Internet are doing the exact same thing.

Zhao Tao in Ash Is Purest White

Complaining that Eddie Murphy didn't get a Best Actor nomination makes sense. But Taron Egerton? ... And complaining that Jennifer Lopez didn't get a Best Supporting Actress nomination when she was clearly the lead actress in that movie seems like just another way of swallowing the line the studios tried to sell the Academy. That line of argument already accepts the terms set by the studios and their media blitzes.

And so... I have some (serious) challenges for anyone complaining about the Academy's favorite things this year:

Challenge One:
Forget the white folks altogether! Name twenty actors of color who you would have nominated for Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor for 2019.

Challenge Two:
Name five films made primarily in a language other than English that you would have nominated for Best International Feature. You don't have to choose from the submission list – most of those films haven't been released in the U.S. yet. Just choose five really good foreign language films that you loved this year.

Challenge Three:
Watch only films and television directed by women for three months.

Of course, you're free to complain about what the Academy likes; we all are. That's part of the pleasure of the Academy's choices. We can all bitch about why they're wrong and who would've been better choices. But what we all need is better cinema. We all need to watch more stories about black people, people of color, women, and trans people. We should all be watching more foreign cinema. And we can really only expect the Academy to be better if we're better.