But furthermore, I wanted to make sure this is clear. I am a white cis male commenting on representation concerning black people. In which case, my opinion is pretty irrelevant. I am in favor of minority, gender, and sexual representation in American culture and being significantly more present in all film. But I say that as someone whose life is not as directly impacted by it as other writers. I highly encourage that if you like this article, you also seek out, listen to, and support those writers first.
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The Oscars are tomorrow night. On the verge of this annual gathering of the celebration of not only the films, actors, writers, and crew men that make our cinematic pleasures possible, but the way the leading representative body of those factions of Hollywood creators view the output of their own art form, I wanted to let you the people know two very important things:
The Oscars Do Not Matter
and
The Oscars Do Matter
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In 2015, Selma, a film celebrating one of the biggest victories and conflicts of the Civil Rights Movement and centering on Martin Luther King Jr, was entirely snubbed at the Oscars for all but one major award: Best Picture.
At the time it was questioned as to how a film could be considered "Best" if the Academy hadn't felt it deserving of any individual awards. Furthermore, it gave off the feel that in an Oscar year so full of white faces up for awards, how this wasn't an example of Tokenism from the MPAA, the governing guild that votes and puts on the Academy Awards.
That year and the next the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began trending in discussion, and the Academy responded by vastly increasing the amount of Black representation they had in the Academy. And by vastly, I do mean by like oh... one or two percent. It's something at least, and they released a vow to ensure that they would be increasing the amount of representation over the years.
Which leads us a few less controversial years to today where perhaps the most hopeful candidates for Best Picture are Black Panther and BlackKklansman - both of which have significant merit to be winners of the take home category and perhaps in a vein where the Academy can finally say - we did better.
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Oscars Don't Matter
At the end of the day, the only thing even securing a win does for the Academy is allow them a history of reward. When, in 2020 we see that only the whitest of 2019 is being represented, the academy will be able to point back and say, yeah but BlackKklansman/Black Panther won last year so like we don't have to keep worrying about this. If you don't believe me, recheck the 2016 Presidential Campaign.
There have been massive cultural shifts in mainstream culture - including another rightful wave of Feminism and a big push in Minority Representation in films.
The ousting of serial sexual harassers and A-list celebs from TV, Stage, and Film worlds has pushed the power of women and minority voices up and forward.
But a positive fact is this - these voices have that power without being recognized.
The main reason the Oscars don't matter is because Black Panther made a billion dollars. And for three decades Spike Lee has been one of the most pre-eminent black film makers who has made a successful career on telling black stories (and we're going to excuse him for ever touching an Oldboy remake). These films have made their cultural impact. Being recognized by an overwhelmingly white group doesn't in any way benefit or rectify a history of having to be taught painful lessons of embarrassment on the Internet.
Part of the bigger problem of these cultural shifts is that the dominant culture wants to appease. As if three hundred years of slavery can be washed away with one single reparation.
Again, these films have earned their place in the culture. Black Panther is one of the most successful films of all time and appropriately uses the Marvel formula to make a compelling and powerful film about being Black. It's phenomenally important, likely the best film of the decade for me (not that that really matters), and the absolute watermark of how far we are progressing.
Best Picture just solidifies what it is.
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Oscars Do Matter
Everything said above is true.
But here's the thing. Everything I said above is impactful and important for people who pay attention to, deal in, and debate the current culture. The intellectual part of the Millennial, X, and Boomer generations.
There is an entire set of people who aren't as educated, aren't as invested, who pay no attention to the cultural context of everything. I understand where the directors who complained about technical awards being cut from the show were coming from. The Oscars matter. They show off the art form celebrating its best artists of the year and displaying how important it is for people, in front and behind the camera, to make the art that matters to us.
But the fact is that the Oscars are also a thinning of the herd. Hundreds and thousands of films are produced, developed, and released every single year. The majority of people just want to know what the best is. And historically, those films have either been less popular, more "artistic", on the nose cultural relevance films. The term Oscar Bait exists for a reason, and its not because certain qualities denote what is and isn't actually good film making policy.
This actually brings up a contention I have between my opinion on who "should" win Best Picture. Black Panther and BlackKklansmen both represent something about the black experience in America. They represent a spectrum of what it means to be in this place at this time and to be well represented in film. But the film that wins says something significant about the privileged class of the Academy and in the country.
Black Panther is a marvel film. A superhero movie. No matter how significant or impactful it is, it's a formula film. The celebration, relevance, and impact this film has is significant and entirely subverts what we've come to expect from this formula.
Three years ago, I was writing several drafts of a multi-part series about how Watchmen was the end of significant development in superhero stories. And that may still be true from a narrative aspect.
What Black Panther proves as a film is that superhero can be as meaningful a medium, more meaningful a medium, than the traditional drama, biopic, narrative driven films that dominate the Best Picture winner history. Black Panther is a film that celebrates and drives home the pain of the Black American experience and even after that "villain" has proven himself power hungry and something that has to be beaten, it still has the balls to give him the most powerful one line of dialogue that I've experienced.
"Can you believe that? A kid from Oakland, walking around believing in fairy tales."
That is a significant and powerful indictment. Black Panther is a fairy tale of what could be. This is the goal of representation, to prevent people from feeling trapped by their surroundings.
BlackKklansman is a significant film. But one that continues saying what Spike Lee wanted to say thirty years ago - America has a long way to go in making it a tenable place for black people to live and thrive. The gut punch of that historical comedy is that by the way the KKK still exist and still fuck shit up and still regularly contribute to violent attacks on innocent victims. One film, one black man getting the up and up on that group means nothing compared to the thousands who marched on Charleston - the location of a violent racist mass shooting that killed people gathered in a place of worship, a place of peace.
The correct way to honor that message, to show to every black American that that progress is being made - is to honor the fairy tale that Killmonger needed.
And that is why the Oscars don't and do matter.
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