Just three years ago, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave nabbed wins for three of its nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. However, the subsequent years saw fewer black nominees — and not because there haven’t been black films worthy of recognition. Rather, the pattern mirrored the history of the Academy Awards and its relationship with black artistry, which has been characterized by a profound absence and silence in regards to the fullness of the black experience. When Hattie McDaniel won in 1939 for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind, it was for a character, Mammy, who was not speaking to black audiences. Mammy was confirming what white people in Hollywood wanted to believe about slavery. Despite the Oscars’ glaring issues — and maybe because of them — the awards operate as a useful mirror for the history of filmmaking in America, equally for what they reward and what they silence. And by extension, these awards operate as a history of how people in power in America want to see themselves, and others.
The 2017 Academy Awards appear to mark a profound step forward for the recognition of black filmmakers. This year features the most Best Picture nominations ever for films with black producers (Hidden Figures, Fences, Manchester by the Sea). Bradford Young, one of today’s best cinematographers, is nominated for his work on Arrival; it’s only the second time a black cinematographer has received a nod. The category of Best Documentary includes a record four black-helmed projects: Ava DuVernay’s exploration of the prison system, 13th; Ezra Edelman’s nearly eight-hour O.J. Simpson documentary, O.J.:Made in America; Roger Ross Williams’ Disney-focused Life, Animated; and Raoul Peck’s moving James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Elsewhere, there is Barry Jenkins’ semi-autobiographical triptych, Moonlight. The coming-of-age film, which follows a young black kid struggling with his sexuality in a hyper-specific slice of Miami, is nominated for a total of eight Academy Awards, including Joi McMillon for Best Editing.
Moonlight is not the first low-budget, independent darling pitted as an underdog against a more traditional industry giant. (This year La La Land, with 14 nominations and success at previous awards shows, fits the latter distinction.) But it feels unique for its powerful exploration of a black identity that has historically gotten little screen time and for its utter refusal to make room for whiteness. There are no white saviors that liberal white audiences can relate to, nor any virulent racists that they can feel easily superior to. Moonlight is an undeniably, powerfully black story.
“The film is important because it is a beautiful, sweet, open love letter to the core human values that connect us all,” filmmaker/actor Mark Duplass wrote, in encouraging Academy voters to consider Moonlight for Best Picture. “It is important because it reaches beyond its specific characters and tells the story of all of our dreams and collective life experiences.” It’s a sweet sentiment, but lurking under the surface is an argument that I find damning. Because Moonlight doesn’t consider white identity, seeing filmmakers, critics, and fans of the film remark on its so-called universality feels like an attempt to co-opt the work and, worse, to center whiteness. To ignore that Moonlight is a distinctly black story is a failure of imagination and empathy. If the only way non-black, non-queer people can admire and be moved by it is to insert themselves into its story, that proves how much work Hollywood — and American viewers — has yet to do.
Consider the anonymous Oscar ballot discussions that The Hollywood Reporter publishes during award season. I am reminded of a 2015 entry in which an anonymous voter had an explanation for why Ava DuVernay didn’t get a Best Director nomination for Selma, despite the film being up for Best Picture: “If the director [Ava DuVernay] suffered from anything, it was gender discrimination, not race discrimination. This whole race thing was spun out of control by the press,” the voter said, as if black women can separate our gender and racial identities into neat boxes.
This year’s nominations garnered praise from the African-American Film Critics Association, whose president, Gil Robertson IV, said, “The African-American Film Critics Association is totally thrilled with the record-breaking number of nominations earned this year by actors and other creative artists of color. AAFCA applauds the Academy’s efforts, and we hope that their progress continues to reflect America’s rich diversity.” It’s that last point that is particularly salient. What happens next?
The films nominated at this year’s ceremony were in production before the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was created. But the Twitter campaign, the increasingly mainstream conversations about representation in media and entertainment, and the broader ability for audiences to make their voices heard, thanks to social media, have obviously affected the landscape of Hollywood. That’s why it’s troubling to witness some white critics deem #OscarsSoWhite, and by extension the fight it represents, as no longer necessary, thanks to this year having several black nominees. Consider the headline of a January 2017 Deadline Hollywood article: “Not So White After All: Oscar Nominations End Diversity Drought With New Honorees.” That’s already insulting, but nestled into the first half of the article is a passage that stopped me cold: “[B]lack actors, in the decade culminating in 2014, received a share of nominations and Oscars approximately matching their share of the U.S. population.” Never mind that the hashtag was created to highlight the lack of minority representation across the board, not just black filmmakers and actors. “One year cannot make up for nearly 90 years of a lack of representation,” said April Reign, the creator of the hashtag. Representation isn’t merely, or even primarily, a numbers game.
Moreover, even when black actors do get nominations on par with the census statistics about the black population in this country, that doesn’t necessarily mark progress. Far too often, these diversity conversations revolve around the success of actors, since they are the most visible markers of progress. But that isn’t enough. To focus just on actors is to ignore the crucial behind-the-scenes dynamics that have led black actors being relegated to roles that, like Mammy, often amount to little more than clever reinventions of stereotypes. Who writes, produces, and directs these films can be more important than who stars in them. It took until the 1990s for black creatives to be nominated in the categories of Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography, and Best Director. The presence of black creatives before then at the Oscars, beyond the actors, was largely limited to musical categories (save for Hugh A. Robertson’s Best Editing nomination for Midnight Cowboy and Quincy Jones’ nomination as a producer on Best Picture nominee The Color Purple).
Hidden Figures, a successful and moving exploration of the lives of black women working for NASA during the early 1960s, is led by a trio of incredible performances, particularly that of Taraji P. Henson. But as happy as I am about the actors who appear in the film, proving that stories about black women can be beloved, it isn’t lost on me that the film is directed by a white man and co-written by a white woman yet based on a non-fiction book by a black writer, Margot Lee Shetterly. It’s been criticized for grafting a narrative that never existed in the real lives of the women it’s based on to include an example of a good white person on the right side of history. Executive producer Mimi Valdes and Pharrell Williams, who had a hand in the soundtrack and producing the film, are the only primary black creators behind the scenes. Black filmmakers shouldn’t be relegated to only telling black stories, but Hidden Figures is an important reminder that the presence of films at the Academy Awards starring black actors is not enough.
Despite the Oscars’ glaring issues — and maybe because of them — the awards operate as a useful mirror for the history of filmmaking in America.
Again, this isn’t because black directors weren’t doing amazing work. Think of Julie Dash’s glorious Daughters of the Dust that explores the matriarchal lineage of a Gullah family before they migrate north in 1902. (It’s recently been re-released, thanks to a renewed surge of interest.) Consider Haile Gerima’s challenging slavery/time travel epic, Sankofa. Consider the work of early black independent cinema pioneer Oscar Micheaux, whose 1920 film, Within Our Gates, is a powerful response to D.W. Griffith’s racist masterwork, The Birth of a Nation. Black independent talent often veers toward the poetic — boldly subverting the form, function, and content of cinema’s wider canon. As historian James Snead wrote, “Their chief ambition was to rewrite the standard cinematic language of cuts, fades, frame composition, and camera movement in order to represent their own ‘non-standard’ vision of black people and culture.” It’s this tradition that an independent filmmaker such as Barry Jenkins, and therefore Moonlight, moves within.
Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, marked a turning point in the history of American cinema. But its showing at the 1990 Academy Awards was paltry. It was nominated for two awards, including Best Screenplay, and won nothing, further setting the stage for Lee’s tense relationship with the Academy. Driving Miss Daisy, which won the award for Best Picture that year, is at best a footnote in history compared to Do the Right Thing. It took 25 years after this for the Oscars to hand Lee an award: an honorary Oscar in 2015, at an event that is no longer even televised. It’s reasons like this that Lee says the Oscars “don’t matter.” But the Oscars do matter, for better or worse. You can simultaneously understand their poor history in awarding the best films of the year and want minority filmmakers to get a moment in the spotlight.
Moonlight’s position at the Oscars was in the back of my mind as I watched Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, which is ultimately an argument for James Baldwin’s prescience and continued relevance as a black intellectual. In recent years, it’s felt like Baldwin has become a neat tool for people to demonstrate their progressive thinking. Baldwin is a writer who challenges, not placates, as critic K. Austin Collins explores in his appraisal of Peck’s documentary. The same can be said about Moonlight. But Oscar history rarely has awarded the bold.
Only four black directors have ever been nominated for Best Director — the first was John Singleton in 1991 and the most recent, Barry Jenkins for Moonlight. No black woman has ever been nominated for the award. And even worse, despite the amazing work of directors such as Kasi Lemmons and Julie Dash, few black women have ever had sustainable careers behind the camera. DuVernay, in the March 2017 issue of Essence, said, “I feel, if I’m honest, that there’s a short window for me in the business. There’s no black woman who’s had a 20- to 30-year consistent career in which she’s been free to make what she wants to make and has had people wanting to finance that.”
This is why this year’s Academy Awards, whether Moonlight wins in major categories or not, are just the beginning. In Black Faces, White Masks, Martinique-born philosopher Franz Fanon explores black identity to argue it isn’t that we feel inferior as black people but as if we don’t exist at all. “Instead, we obsessively search for recognition, like the recognition of another's gaze, in order to formulate an existence, to become self-aware,” Jeremy O. Harris wrote about the book. Demanding black artistry be funded, made, and awarded is not a numbers game. It’s not just about righting decades of wrongs or fixing injustices. It’s about one of the most simple and poignant human desires: to be seen. Until this happens for black creatives, Hollywood — and by extension, America itself — will never be able to reckon with its own racism.
