The State of the Race: In Its 89th Year, After a Massive Protest, the Oscars Stand on the Precipice of Making History

The other day, a former reader wrote a comment on my Facebook page saying that he used to love the site but then it became “too political,” meaning it focused too much on women and black filmmakers and actors. He wanted a “regular Oscars site.” I can certainly understand that and there are no shortage of those. Longtime readers know that the site’s tone has changed along with its design, its staff, and its community. Things by nature shift. Adapt or die, as the saying goes. It isn’t that I feel this site is thriving or anything. But I can sleep at night. That I can do.

When I first started Oscarwatch back in 1999, there were a few out there doing Oscar predicting, like Gold Derby, the Oscar Igloo (now Awards Circuit), Zeusefer. But no site tracked the awards from the beginning of the year until the end like I did. No one was analyzing the race from start to finish. My objective then was to address a question that had long puzzled me: why is it films like Citizen Kane are so revered but don’t win Best Picture? It was a mystery I wanted to solve because I thought the answer might be something more profound than what it turned out to be.

Since then, I’ve watch the Oscars change from celebrating films that the public loves to celebrating films that the critics love. These days, a movie like Citizen Kane might do better than it did back in 1942. In fact, it might even win now. It was and is such a stroke of genius, such a fierce leap forward in the arc of America cinema. On the other hand, John Ford was one of the kings in Hollywood, reaching the first peak of his mastery, and he was working on his third Oscar for Best Director. The first two he won did not carry Best Picture along with them. Ang Lee today is where John Ford was before he won for How Green was My Valley. That win, like so many to follow, had more to do with Hollywood rewarding its own, patting some people on the back for careers well done. Along with a wariness toward anything too new that might upset the system. That was really the old way. That was why Ron Howard won for A Beautiful Mind and why Clint Eastwood won for both Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby and probably part of why Martin Scorsese won for The Departed. But things are different now. Best Picture winners today tend to be created by directors that are either unknown or by those very much outside the system of Hollywood, many of them flashing the alluring vitality of their backgrounds from other countries.

If Damien Chazelle wins Best Director this year, he will be the first American-born director to win since the Academy expanded the Best Picture race to more than 5 nominees, the first since Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker.

But there is another story to tell with the Oscar race, and that’s the one that travels alongside the story of African American filmmakers in Hollywood. That story really begins with the film that, to date, is the all-time box office champ when you adjust for inflation, and one that holds the record for most Oscars ever won under the preferential ballot. That’s Gone with the Wind. When Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind, it was a mixed blessing for her. On one side, you had angry white America in the South refusing to allow her to attend the premiere in Atlanta, and on the other side, the exasperated black community who believed her portrayal as a “happy slave” was a betrayal to their holocaust. McDaniel had been working in show business for a very long time and her famous quote about her role was, “I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than than earn $7 a day being one.”

That was in 1939. Gone with the Wind was an Oscars phenomenon, and it was also largely boycotted by the black community at the time. Black actors were caught in the middle — they wanted to work but they didn’t have many options in the screenplays of the era other than to stand silently in the background, or have some wry line here or there about misbehaving children. The alternative to refusing these parts was not work at all. It’s funny — or  not — how little changed since then.

As someone who began to cover the race all the way from the beginning of each year until the ceremony Oscar Night, I began to notice things. The questions I had on my mind stopped being so much about the reasons this or that white man didn’t get such and such award, and instead became more focused on why was it only white men who ever won at all? For me, the turning point was in 2001 when Halle Berry and Denzel Washington were both up for Oscars the same year. Both were playing variations on  Hollywood clichés — Washington was a corrupt cop turned drug dealer in Training Day and Berry was a downtrodden woman in Monster’s Ball. What struck me was this simple truth: at that point in Academy history, seven decades had passed and no black actress had ever won an Oscar for a lead role.

When that fact embarrassing became the narrative and the Academy faced the option of awarding Sissy Spacek her second Oscar for In the Bedroom, or Russell Crowe his second for A Beautiful Mind, it was an easy call. Both Denzel Washington and Halle Berry made Oscar history.

But believe me, I can testify that not many Oscar people want you to talk about that or write about it or complain about it. They really don’t. It’s considered a big bummer. People naively believe that the Oscars have been always about quality and nothing else, when in fact these awards have often been less about quality and more about popularity from their very inception. Since the entire upper echelon of the industry is majority white, that popularity factor tends to center around white actors.

Spike Lee, Robert Townsend and John Singleton began to change things for black filmmakers back in the 1980s. But Lee was considered “too controversial.” Not only was his milestone film Do the Right Thing nearly shut out in 1989, salt was rubbed in the wound by awarding Best Picture to its antithesis, Driving Miss Daisy. That year seemed to set the mold for the next quarter century in Oscar history — a history that would trigger long-simmering frustration last year when, for the second year in a row, the acting line-up was 100% white. That meant shutting out such remarkable work as Idris Elba gave us in Beasts of No Nation. It meant shutting out Selma’s David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. to make room for an American Sniper — I kid you not.

The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag and subsequent boycott was well deserved and a long time coming. So frustrated was I covering this race that I felt I had no choice but to talk about the bizarre segregation that anyone with a brain could plainly and clearly see. To the Academy’s credit, they took the uproar and boycott very seriously. AMPAS president Cheryl Boone Isaacs made sweeping, dramatic changes that many people didn’t like. The shift was uncomfortable and irritating to traditionalists, and it continues to be addressed with an unseemly sneer by media covering it. But the result is worth the scorn. The Academy has made good to include more women and women of color and more directors of color in its ranks. They made efforts to “retire” the voting privilege for some of the old guard who have not been active in the industry for years, to make way for younger generations whose attitudes and experience will inject fresh ways of thinking when choosing nominees and Oscar winners.

The beginning of 2016 saw the rise and fall of Nate Parker with The Birth of a Nation, which had at first been expected to be a resounding remedy to #OscarsSoWhite. There is no point in going over why Parker was shunned from the community, but for a while there it was looking like the film might help mark a turning point. When it faltered, many of us were resigned to be confronted by yet another demoralizing season of films by and about white people. More boycotts, more anger. But then a movie called Moonlight screened at Telluride. I don’t know and can’t say whether that durable hashtag and Birth of a Nation’s downfall made people more amenable to watching Moonlight, but it came out of Telluride as one of the year’s most beloved achievements, along with La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, and Arrival.

Next came Denzel Washington’s ferocious screen adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences. Wilson had demanded the film be directed by a black filmmaker, not a white one; thus, it was many years until the stars aligned and Washington and Viola Davis, who both had already won Tonys for their outstanding performances, were able to bring their work to a wider audience. Washington starred and directed. His skill as a director has not been appreciated as much as many of us feel it should, not nearly as much as his work in front of the camera. But after that hashtag, again, audiences were more amenable, less overly critical of every little thing, and now Fences has a SAG Ensemble, a WGA, and a PGA nod.

For a while it looked like Fences and Moonlight might make history as the first year when two films written by, directed by, and starring African American filmmakers would get Best Picture nominations. Then Hidden Figures came along. A film about three black female math whizzes and engineers who worked at NASA to put men on the moon? Really? Really. So while there is some grumbling in the black community that it was written by and directed by white filmmakers, they certainly can’t say it features maids or drug addicts. Hidden Figures has made a whopping $84 million and has taken the top spot at the box office for two weeks in a row. That’s astounding. It also has a SAG Ensemble, a WGA, and a PGA nomination.

In the years I’ve been covering the Oscar race, I’ve seen the first woman win Best Director and Best Picture, the first African American woman win Best Actress, the first Best Picture winner directed by a black director about slavery told from the point of view of African American characters, and the first Best Picture nominee directed by an African American woman. So, in my exhilaration of these moments, I may have lost readers. For those we have lost, I do feel a little sorry. I’m sorry to have bummed people out with what I write, but I have to believe that change doesn’t come easy — not anywhere — so whenever it does, we need to acknowledge it. We need to exalt in it.  Disruptions are necessary, and essential to proudly embrace, no matter where they come from.

My friend Wesley Morales (@blackfilm) on Twitter wrote me that “I count at least 14 Blacks receiving Oscar nods and as high as possibly 17. Will definitely be historic tomorrow.” I have to figure that the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, though it likely infuriates our new Breitbart president, might have had an enormous impact. That shows you what a hive mind can do when enough of us unite to buzz for the right reasons.

So my friends, I’m not going to be doing this forever. But I do hope that those who choose to write about the Oscars remember that these awards cannot help but be political — because they represent power and who gets to wield it. Oscars lead to more opportunities.  More opportunities will lead to better roles and better films. Better representation will open doors. The Oscars needed to change and change fast. We’ll find out tomorrow morning if they continue to do so.

A lot of headlines will be all about La La Land’s potentially history-making 14 nominations. That film is poised to sweep the awards as many are comfortably expecting, with Viola Davis and Mahershala Ali potentially taking home the supporting Oscars. That will be a thrill for those who love the film about LA dreamers, of which there are many. But please let’s not forget the other big story of Oscar’s inevitable trajectory, the parallel story about a hashtag that, at least for one year, made all the difference.