The Oscars Nominations
'Tis the season for award shows. The Golden Globes aired on Sunday and the Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday, in what has become a weirdly formal ceremony where celebrities turn up to have their name read out by Captain Kirk, like a surreal school assembly (although it did produce this classic line-flubbing moment). But the Globes will always be the more relaxed and fun cousin of the Oscars - helped by generous servings of alcohol - and there were several great moments over the course of the evening, even by awards-ceremony-bullshit standards. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey proved, yet again, that they were the funniest women working in Hollywood - while the North Korea jokes became dull, their close-to-the-bone jab at Bill Cosby was hysterical. And Michael Keaton's (now viral) acceptance speech was just as honest and moving as everyone said it was.
But there's only so much you can write about awards shows before it all starts to sound the same, the standard industrial jargon used by journalists all over the world. So I thought I'd talk about something a little different. Following the announcement of the Oscar nominations some people on Twitter began posting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. This was in response to the fact that all twenty of the year's acting nominees are white, in spite of David Oyelowo's celebrated turn as Martin Luther King that seemed to be a shoo-in for a nomination. Not covered by the hashtag, yet still equally criticised, was the complete absence of women in the directing and writing categories.
Now, I've got mixed views on this. On the one hand, yes, it's a shame that Oyelowo and Ava DuVernay have been ignored, although few people have mentioned the fact that Selma has been nominated for two awards including Best Picture (which not even Foxcatcher managed to nab). But on the other it just seems strange to nominate films and performances for the sole purpose of diversity. Yes, the Academy is not the most progressive institution in America - it's still odd to remember that Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash ten years ago - but I do think we've seen some improvement. Let's not forget that 12 Years a Slave won last year, which was an incredibly uncompromising look at a subject most of the (predominantly white) members of the Academy would find uncomfortable at best.
So maybe 2014 just wasn't a year which showcased enough racially diverse performances. Whether this is a problem with the culture of Hollywood itself is another matter (and the controversy of the "whitewashing" of Exodus: Gods and Kings and Ghost in the Shell would seem to suggest this). But I don't have the energy to get angry about this matter, nor about the omission of women in the creative categories - while I think some formidable female talent has emerged this year (Jennifer Kent, Gillian Robespierre, Ana Lily Amirpour) I'm not surprised or outraged by the results of the nominations. 2014 has been a really good year for male directors and writers, many of whom released career-best work, and I surprise myself by saying that I mostly agree with all of the Academy's nominations this year.
Except for The Lego Movie snub. Fuck that.
