Since the Academy Award nominations were released last week there has been a growing sense of anger among many of the film industry’s top black actors, actresses and directors all calling for more DIVERSITY! This is largely because for the second year running all twenty of the available acting nominations (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Male and Best Supporting Female) have gone to white actors.
Many had been hoping for nominations for Michael B. Jordan’s performance in Creed; Idris Elba’s in Beasts of No Nation; Will Smith’s in Concussion; some of the cast of Straight Outta Compton; Spike Lee’s Chi-raq etc, which explains why #OscarsSoWhite has been trending for the second consecutive year. This escalated yesterday when Lee and Jada Pinkett-Smith both declared they’re going to boycott the Oscar’s next month which in turn led President of the Academy itself, Cheryl Boone Isaacs to say:
I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes. The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership. In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond.
Which is great, I guess. To be fair, Lee, Smith and co probably have a point, it does seem a little unlikely that the top 40 performances over the last 2 years have all been from white actors. But everybody seems to have ignored what in my opinion is the larger diversity problem surrounding the Oscars, namely the award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film of the Year’. To be more precise, my issue is not so much with that specific award as much how foreign language films are dealt with by the Academy in general.
First, to get a couple of things straight, I realise that foreign language films aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, and also that the Oscars are generally quite a commercial awards ceremony. Also, most countries will have their own awards ceremonies where films from that country are likely to take precedent over a lot of the films which will be up for Oscars. The problem is that foreign language films aren’t restricted to the ‘Best Foreign Language Film of the Year’ category. If they were limited to just that category I guess you could look at the Academy Awards as the simply the US film awards in which they also have an award to recognise some other work from around the world. That’s not ideal, but given the Oscars are the Mount Olympus of film award ceremonies, and consequently have one of, if not the largest global viewership of any film awards, it makes sense to recognise world cinema in some way.
The problem is by allowing them to be nominated for any category including ‘Best Motion Picture of the Year’ as well as ‘Best Actor’ etc, the implication is that foreign language films are being judged the same way as English speaking films. This is fine in theory but in practice it’s almost an insult as since 1938 when La Grande Illusion was nominated for ‘Best Picture’ only eight other foreign language films have ever been nominated, and none of them have won. That eight also includes Letters from Iwo Jima which is predominantly in Japanese but was directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Dirty Harry himself as well as Robert Lorenz and Steven Spielberg, so quite an American affair.
The other issue with allowing films to be nominated for both best film categories is that four of the nine nominations (Z, Life Is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon & Amour) won ‘Best Foreign Film’ but failed to win ‘Best Picture’ suggesting that films from any country in the world other than the US or the UK are just not as good. This point is more obvious, looking at the years The Emigrants, Cries and Whispers, The Postman (Il Postino) and Letters From Iwo Jima were nominated for ‘Best Picture’, as they weren’t even nominated for ‘Best Foreign Film’ implying that one category actually is better quality than the other. Also, that must be pretty gutting for the guys who won ‘Best Foreign Film’ in those years, the Academy have basically said you weren’t even the best foreign language film this year, but you may as well have the award anyway?? Plus it’s got to be even worse for the foreign films that did get nominated for ‘Best Picture’ in those years as they’re clearly never going to win it, so for them their prize for is not ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ but instead they get a really shiny loser’s medal.
Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit but it does seem to me that in the wake of the Academy President declaring that there will have to be ‘big changes’ to the awards, they should take a good look at how international cinema is represented at the moment, and how they want to represent it in the future because as it is at the moment I don’t think it works. It is worth saying that there have been Oscars won for foreign language films in categories other than best film: 6 ‘Best Actor/Actress’ winners (although that includes De Niro in The Godfather Part II and Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, not saying they didn’t deserve it but it is worth noting that both films are largely in English), 1 ‘Best Animated Feature’, 1 ‘Best Documentary’, 3 ‘Best Art Direction’, 4 ‘Best Cinematography’ etc. But even with those wins it still seems like the odds are stacked against foreign language films at the Oscars.
Importantly, the editorial in next month’s issue of the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine talks about the decline of interest in international cinema in the UK over the last few years, due to the oversaturation of the market and the same recognised directors being talked about by some critics, rather than showcasing emerging talent. There’s also another piece in the same issue issue which points out that in the UK it’s the first year where no non-Hindi foreign language film made more than £1 million at the box office. Both these examples highlight the waning interest in international cinema (albeit in the UK not the US, although you only have to go back to the 2010 Oscars to find the same amount of nominations for ‘Best Picture’ for British films than there have been in the history of cinema for foreign language ones); a trend which could be helped partly if the Academy’s diversity changes do better to represent films in foreign languages. I have a feeling they won’t, but who knows if they do, it could prove to be an important step in the revival of international cinema?
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