I can’t really pinpoint the exact year it happened, but there was no doubt a gradual deterioration in American cinema during the 2010s. What happened? Well, the oft-mentioned reason is the rise of the superhero genre with “Iron Man” in 2008, which kickstarted the 20+ movie MCU, not to mention the DCEU as well. This led to Disney and Warner Bros. monopolizing the industry with superhero movies, live-action remakes, and countless reboots.
Fine, I get all that, this was a major shape shifting moment and part of the reason why cinema fell apart this past decade, but the second, and more intriguing, reason was the #OscarsSoWhite movement.
If you remember, in 2014 and 2015, the Academy, and really the industry as a whole, were ridiculed by “Black Twitter” and became the target of hashtag movements such as #OscarsSoWhite. Then the media jumped on the bandwagon and called out the industry for its lack of racial diversity amongst the nominees in major categories. I mean, they had a point, all twenty acting nominees and four out of the five directors nominated were white. We started to see things shift when “Selma” director Ava DuVernay was snubbed that year.
April Reign was credited with starting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Even more embarrassingly, she noted that white screenwriters of the black-dominated film “Straight Outta Compton” earned nominations, but the African American cast didn’t. Jada Pinkett Smith, Spike Lee, Lupita Nyong'o, Reese Whitherspoon, Tyrese Gibson, and 50 Cent, among many others, all peer-pressured Chris Rock to drop out of his Oscar hosting duties. He didn’t. Even Al Sharpton weighed in, as he always does with these sort of things, by holding protests outside the Kodak theater as the ceremony was happening.
In an interview with a French radio station, Best Actress nominee Charlotte Rampling (“45 Years”) got flack when she said efforts to stage an boycott of the Oscars were "racist to whites." Any counter-reactive opinion to the #OscarsSoWhite movement was halted after that. People shut up. They towed the line and joined the chorus of virtue signaling by basically implying that a film doesn’t necessarily need to be the best of any given year to get nominated so long as it check-marked all the “woke” requirements needed to get approval from the Twitter warriors.
During an interview, then President Barack Obama fueled the flames by saying, “I think when everybody’s story is told, then that makes for better art. That makes for better entertainment. It makes everybody feel part of one American family. So I think, as a whole, the industry should do what every other industry should do, which is to look for talent, provide opportunity to everybody.” The Academy had to respond in a way to appease and, ultimately, give in to the demands, they did. A week after the nominees were announced, the Oscars announced rules changes regarding membership, which would see an increase in the number of women and minorities included in the membership by 2020.
The year after, Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” about a gay African-American man, was praised to the high heaven’s by critics and won the Oscar for Best Picture.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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