Wait, did you really think awards were fair?
I’ll admit I am always surprised at the public outrage, when something happens like the recent Oscar snub of Barbie director Greta Gerwig and the film’s protagonist Margot Robbie, respectively left out of the Best Director and Best Actress race. Ryan Gosling, man that he is, instead walked away with a nomination for being “just Ken” and it is undeniably a slap in the face for women everywhere — since the film is about a doll women play with and a world inhabited by women characters.
But we fail to find within us the spirit to joyously celebrate the very first ever Native American actress, Lily Gladstone, nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. This is history in the making, so late in the American story and so far out of the game it is unfortunately tragic history in the making, but nonetheless, it provides a roadmap for a better future.
Or does it.
The outrage always involves the role of women — who are either misrepresented, not represented or overly exploited. But the cycle of hell that all professional women in the arts have to face starts with us. Women, not helping other women. Or women only helping themselves, at the cost of other, you guessed it, women.
Not that men are that willing and able to help out along the way either. As much as we women can be catty and envious of one another, men tend to be jealous of our successes. I watched a show recently which talked about the life and career of the grandiose Bette Davis, who divorced from her first husband Harmon Oscar ("Ham") Nelson, because, and I quote the show, “he became jealous of her success.” How absurd is that? I mean, he was a musician, not an actor and how can a man be jealous of a woman and her success? But it happens. And that’s probably what is going on with Gerwig and her diss. Not to mention Robbie’s miss, which is also because she is one of the film’s producers. Too powerful a role for a little woman, I imagine a lot of Academy voters are thinking.
There is no fair in life and just about right is the best we can do, in the best of times. If life was fair, there would be a Palestinian state and an Israeli one, living side by side and trading the best each one has to offer with the other. What a wonderful world that would be!
Or there would be representation in journalism, and I don’t mean just gay men, but also women of all shapes, colors and sizes and sexual orientation writing about cinema, writing about life and reporting from the frontlines of arts and culture.
And then, naturally there would definitely be more women directors, because women critics would not vote for some of the awful films that are made and celebrated by men. Or maybe they still would, but we women, in content equality with our male colleagues, could not find yet another way to diss our own gender. By failing to celebrate the great occasion of an Indigenous woman, a stunning actress and sublimely talented being like Lily Gladstone. Instead, once again, of focusing on the negative.
For the complete list of nominees check out The Academy website. This year’s Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 10th, 2024, at 4 p.m. Pacific time.