THE 93RD edition of the Academy Awards will be cited by Hollywood historians for decades to come. Six years after the #OscarsSoWhite campaign drew attention to the Academy’s racial bias, non-white and female stars and film-makers prevailed in numbers that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
“Nomadland”, a wistful docudrama about senior citizens living in their vans, won Best Picture, and its Chinese-born writer-director, Chloé Zhao (pictured), won Best Director, making her the second ever woman and first ever woman of colour to do so. As if to emphasise how much the times were changing, the award was introduced by last year’s winner, Bong Joon-ho, who was speaking via satellite from Korea, and who delivered his spiel in Korean. Also from Korea, the Best Supporting Actress was Youn Yuh-jung, who plays an immigrant grandmother in “Minari”, Lee Isaac Chung’s fictionalised account of his childhood in rural Arkansas.
Daniel Kaluuya, a black British actor, was named Best Supporting Actor for his scorching performance in “Judas and the Black Messiah”, a political drama about the FBI’s infiltration of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first black women to win Best Makeup and Hairstyling for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. Emerald Fennell, another Briton, was nominated for Best Director for her feminist revenge comedy-thriller, “Promising Young Woman”, making her one of only seven women ever to have been shortlisted in that category; though she lost out to Ms Zhao, Ms Fennell did win the Best Original Screenplay prize. For once, it wasn’t left to one film such as “Moonlight” or “12 Years a Slave” to do all the heavy lifting when it came to diversity. You could look at several movies and see a reflection of America as it is in the 21st century.
Not that the Academy’s voters had abandoned their old favourites. Frances McDormand, the star of “Nomadland”, won her third Oscar. The late Chadwick Boseman was tipped to win a posthumous Best Actor prize for his role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, but the trophy went to Anthony Hopkins for “The Father”; he had previously won for “Silence of the Lambs”. (“The Father” also won Best Adapted Screenplay.) And Pixar’s existential body-swap cartoon, “Soul”, won awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Score. Two other cartoons from the film’s co-director, Pete Docter, had won Best Animated Feature in the past.
Some things haven’t changed—and the things which have changed cannot all be credited to the Academy’s recent inclusivity drive. As well as the stellar talent of the winners and nominees, another factor is that the coronavirus pandemic prompted Hollywood’s studios to hold back their more commercial films over the past year, thus allowing less mainstream dramas to gain attention in their place. The pandemic had an even greater effect on the staging of the ceremony. For the sake of social distancing, proceedings had been shunted from their regular venue, The Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, to a smaller space in Union Station. The only people watching in the audience were the nominees and their guests, who sat in nightclub-style booths. The celebratory atmosphere was dampened further by the decision to use very few film clips and to have none of the usual musical numbers or comedy routines. These were interesting changes, but the result was less like a typical Oscar extravaganza than a prize-giving at the end of a drab business conference, after most of the delegates had left.
Luckily, the radical results were exciting enough to compensate for their muted presentation. But maybe next year the Academy can retain its new boldness while reinstating some of the erstwhile fun. On April 25th the ceremony drifted to an anticlimactic ending because the final award winner, the 83-year-old Mr Hopkins, had opted for a good night’s sleep at home in Wales instead of attending. You could hardly blame him.
By The Economist
