Another Awards Ceremony, Another Predictable Whinge

You had to feel sorry for Mo'Nique, as she tiptoed onstage at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles last Tuesday to unveil the list of nominees for the year's Oscars – and not just because the job required her to appear under bright lights, in full cocktail attire, at the ungodly hour of 5.30am.

Oh? So, why then?

Confounding the hopes of everyone who dared think that the statuettes raised by Mo'Nique and her colleagues last March might herald a bright future for minority cinema, 2011's Oscars have turned into the whitest in recent history.

Not a single black man or woman has been shortlisted for any major award.

So what? Isn't this a film award ceremony, not a colour-of-skin awards ceremony?

The 10 films shortlisted for Best Picture are, as a BBC honcho once put it, "hideously" white.

And the reason for this must – just must - be ‘racism, right?

Well, no. Even the article author can’t go that far, and with good reason:

The reason no black films are in the Oscar picture is quite simple: no award-worthy ones were released in 2010.

Anyone want to bet that this itself is down to racism by the cinema audience?

The absence of black film matters, for it lays bare a wider problem: by failing to represent the roughly 15 per cent of Americans who have black skin, the film industry lays bare its increasing reluctance to embrace anything from even slightly outside the mainstream.

Oh, for heaven’s sake!

I don’t often bother to go to the cinema these days, as it’s rarely a pleasure thanks to the increasing lack of manners, but when I do go, I don’t see the audience as being ‘hideously white’. In fact, it's usually made up of a veritable rainbow of races.

So clearly, it’s not a problem for them.

Driving this problem is finance: as movie budgets have risen, producers have become reluctant to take risks.

And why take a multi-million dollar gamble on something that may not appeal to 85% of your audience? Or even to the other 15%?

This further homogenises the already dumbed-down fare in cinemas. So, next time you berate the rubbish screened at multiplexes, bear in mind that it stems from a dearth of variety. And one reason for that dearth is the decline of films about people of colour.

And yet, that audience is clearly not worrying too much. There aren’t many Hollywood directors or movie-house owners on the breadline. The right film can still bring in huge audiences and mega-bucks.

Audiences understand this. It was, perhaps, no coincidence that two of the biggest studio flops of last summer were The Last Airbender and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In both films, the makers excluded minority talent: Prince of Persia's lead was played not by an Iranian, or even a Middle Eastern actor, but by an unshaven Jake Gyllenhaal. In The Last Airbender, a white child actor was cast in the supposedly Asian lead role.

Those films stank. They would have stunk even if the cast had looked like a Benetton advert.

They stank because they were lousy films with stupid scripts and where CGI-effects were shoehorned in in place of heart and soul and character. Not through any defect of casting (well, except for the fact that casting Jake Gyllenhaal in anything is a pretty big defect).

And as the article writer is forced to admit, there are many other things to point the finger at anyway:

If we're being charitable to the industry, the decline in black film has perhaps been part of a decline in independent film. Five years ago, studios began closing their speciality divisions, in part as a response to falling DVD sales, which had traditionally helped smaller movies turn a profit. As these units went, so did the business model for smaller, quirkier film projects.

And will this ever change?

Well, all hail the Internet!

There is but one spot of sunlight on the horizon: the growing potential for film to be streamed online could create a business model where films can find paying viewers without having to secure expensive distribution deals. Titles with smaller target demographics could start to make financial sense.

So, to sum up, the Oscars are ‘hideously white’ but we can’t, in fact, draw any ‘racist’ conclusions from this, no matter how hard we try. And there's already the possibility that the Internet will reverse that decline anyway.

That was a bit of a waste of a newspaper column, wasn’t it?