Dear Oscars, I Love You. But We Need to Talk.

This year the X-ray feels like it was removed from a time capsule. And a little Oscar radiology reveals that eight of the nine movies (minus “Parasite”) are about white people — and, excusing “Little Women,” and Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story” notwithstanding, about white men. “Little Women” is the lone nominee that a woman directed.

O.K., but what’s to roll my eyes at? Welcome to the Nth Annual Academy Awards! I hear that. This might be a reductive way of looking at the Oscars. Math is just organizing the preferences and passions of about 9,000 people. Why’s race such a factor now? Well, for one thing, when it comes to the Oscars, there is some accounting for taste. And this year, the problem isn’t with the particular remaining movies — “1917,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Joker” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — or the white people in them. Not since my wish list and Walkman days, have I despised so few nominees in this category. Most of them I love. As for the one failure, I’ve never worked harder to get with the program. But after four tries, I gave up. This Joker, quite often literally, has no clothes.

Assembled, these distinct movies become a representative entity, and a person like me notices a theme that could poke out an eye. And whiteness is part of that story. It’s always been, of course. But this year feels different. A homogeneity has set in. The nominated movies start to look like picture day at certain magnet schools. “Jojo Rabbit” is a Hitler Youth comedy! Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time …” is a dream about the accidentally heroic pre-emption of racist Charles Manson’s murder plot. And “Little Women” quietly dramatizes the freedom white women experience after the men have left to fight a war; a war to end the enslavement of black people. Sounds a little too ironic, and yet the movie means us to understand the irony. Those white ladies are better off than any black people. They’re just not equal to the women’s enlisted brothers, fathers and beaus. The border between their time and ours has a gusty permeability.

Some of what’s so strong about “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time …” comes from how remembered they both feel — rue-soaked in the first movie; heavy with “what if” in the other. At the movies (in the West), the convenient thing about the past is that you can solve the matter of race by pretending it doesn’t exist. Most of these movies, in addition to their thematic rearview, are based in actual history. (“1917” sends two British World War I soldiers on a critical, thrillingly stressful postal mission.) You can’t put nonwhite people in places they weren’t — and when a movie does, you get something mildly anarchic like a biracial Jewish New Zealander having a ball playing Hitler.

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In Nova Scotia, Homes as Wild as the Landscape Around Them Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time …” has a great line; as they wait for their car, Brad Pitt tells a weepy Leonardo DiCaprio, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Their white American maleness is too mythic and valuable to go around blubbering all over valets. “Joker” is about a comedian, but it doesn’t have Tarantino’s sense of humor about its whiteness. Whiteness here is a tragic, symbolic condition. Overlooked, unseen, under-medicated, Joker, and eventually his disciples, discover that being a guy with a carnival-ready white face helps get him the attention he wants. And even though this is the only movie of the bunch (the only non-Korean, Hitler-free movie) to feature even remotely meaningful parts for nonwhite actors (a bunch of Latinos beat up Joker in the opening minutes; his social worker and neighbor are black women), guess what: He kills a lot of them!

Couldn’t these nine movies just be evidence of taste? Good taste? They certainly could. They are. And yet, after the hash tags and threatened boycotts, after “Hidden Figures,” “Get Out” and “Black Panther” and “BlacKkKlansman”; after “Moonlight” winning over “La La Land”; after no woman being a two-time directing nominee; after the touted diversification campaigns and calls for “inclusion riders” (calls in acceptance speeches!); and in the same year that a popular Latina surprisingly missed the cut and the only black acting nominee is playing a plantation escapee (albeit one of history’s most famous escapees, but still) — the assembly of these movies feels like a body’s allergic reaction to its own efforts at rehabilitation.

Only two of the nine movies are set in what we’d called the present moment; and one of those (“Parasite”) comes to us from Seoul. Which means, the other seven — six of which are set in the United States — take place in the past. The last time something like that happened was in 2009, back when there were still only five nominees and the movie most present was set in Mumbai — “Slumdog Millionaire.” Before that it was the premillennial time warp of 1999: two movies taking place in Elizabethan England and three set during World War II. Out with the new, in with the ancient!

So what’s happening now isn’t exactly novel. Plus, movies set in the present almost never win. The 2017 fiasco that left “La La Land” confused for “Moonlight” is a rare example of front-runners set close to now. I, at least, am amazed that the only two of the nine movies pointing a way forward, embracing modernity (shrewdly in “Little Women”), are by a white American woman and a South Korean man. And that the movie expected to win the Oscar takes place 103 years ago.

Maybe this is just bad luck. I mean, what could the Academy have done to prevent itself from duplicating schisms beyond the movie theater? National schisms. (Nationalist schisms.) According to all the forecasting, these were the nine most predicted nominees. There’s no shafted movie by or about nonwhite people, despite certain passions for “The Farewell” and “Hustlers” or even mine for “Waves.” The last thing I’d want is for the Academy to vet and damage-control the nominees, the way the muckety-mucks who operate the Grammys are rumored to do. Guys, too many whites! We got to get “Queen & Slim” in here. Let the Academy Awards do what they’ve always done: Tell on the film industry.

We’re in the middle of so many shifts. The aim to diversify the movies looks like it’s taking hold just as there are fewer middlebrow studio movies and streaming is becoming king. Some of the shifts involve the remakes, reboots and reimaginings that keep falling from the intellectual property tree — the eternal reliance upon action and superhero movies. Women and nonwhite folks? Put ’em in there! Put ’em in parts that white folks used to have and call it reparations! Comedies and blockbusters with Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista and Issa Rae and Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart and Eugenio Derbez and Jason Momoa.

Really, some of that reupholstery is just more integration. The vicissitudes of progress — all that change, all that changing back — can create an optics headache over at the Academy. It could leave you with whiplash, with the impression that the membership is just over it. I can look at these otherwise innocent movies, gathered together, and surmise progress fatigue: We already did that. If Joaquin Phoenix wins the best actor Oscar for “Joker,” he’s likely to remind his fellow industry professionals, as he did last Sunday at the BAFTAs, that their tiredness is not an option, that it’s an embarrassment.

That fatigue starts to mirror life everywhere else, as it used to be and sometimes as it remains. Separate, unequal: You’ve put enough nonwhite people in pop hits that you have to think alternatively. So when the so-called awards season heats up, you can’t find anything serious, nonwhite and good. So come nomination morn, the Oscars suddenly look like evidence of white flight, this reliable suburb of “quality” and “taste” and eligibility. My favorite complaint from longstanding Academy members about more women and nonwhite people joining the gang is that some of them are in violation of a credits criterion. They’re underqualified for membership but only because the industry has thrived on systemic disqualification.

I know, I know. It’s not as though you can’t find nonwhite people at the movies. “Bad Boys for Life” has been at the top of the box office for three weeks. And that might be part of the problem because the closest “Bad Boys” will ever get to the Oscars is three billboards outside the Dolby Theatre.

AWWWWW. Poor little man getting worked up over something that doesn't matter at all. The Oscars are hardly anything of any consequence in life. How about writing an article about why the black billionaires in the entertainment industry don't reinvest in discovering and encouraging black filmmakers? Tyler Perry is starting to do this. Why not others? But then, the SJWs will always take the easy way out.

He seems to be spinning his own algorithm, which also doesn't make any more sense than how Oscars are chosen. I guess the lesson is you can't be all things to all people. Cultural tastes change.

Much ado about nothing. Clickbait, gratuitous “journalism.”

We get it, white people aren’t worthy of awards and people of color don’t have to do outstanding artwork.

What’s hilarious is that he keeps pointing out all the exceptions (Parasite, Cynthia Erivo; Moonlight) that prove the Academy isn’t racist!

The U.S. is a white majority nation. It’s only natural that most contenders will be white.

This author needs to be grateful for all the affirmative action the Academy DOES do.

Neither Moonlight nor Slumdog Millionaire deserved their awards.

He won a Pulitzer Prize, if you can believe it.

The Quentin Tarantino movie will age like milk. It’s the Crash of 2020.

That Bad Boys should win Oscars!

Give me a fucking break.

[quote]The U.S. is a white majority nation. It’s only natural that most contenders will be white.

I think many people get confused because modern movies/shows tend to be cast multiracial (i.e., everyone has multiracial family/friends/neighbors/colleagues) , which gives off the wrong impression that all the races are evenly distributed throughout the nation. But black people are only like 12% of the population.. The US has a population of 327 million, so blacks only number around 39 million.

Frankly, I'm tired about people whining about the Oscars not being full of black nominees. It's a bore at this point.

"He won a Pulitzer Prize, if you can believe it."

I can believe it, Wesley Morris is a great writer. I admit that this article is not his best one, though.

(chuckles)

He's such a [italic]bitch![/italic]

Ugh, more #OscarsSoWhite bullshit. What I find interesting is that these people never try and offer black counterparts to the films and performers nominated. It's as if they don't have an answer to making the Oscars "less white" and would prefer to bitch about it instead of trying to improve and contribute to Black Cinema.

Oh my god, he did not just imply that Bad Boys should be nominated for Oscars. Pulitzer Prize winner my ass.

I look forward to the day when Tyler Perry's Medea saga is winning Oscars and Will Smith is awarded Best Actor for his performance in Men In Black VII. The future looks bright.

Is #OscarsSoKorean trending on white twitter yet?

R5, at least, unlike you, he got paid to get worked up about something that doesn't matter.

Wesley Morris is a smug, aggravating asshole who writes nothing but shit. A quick look at the past articles he's written for The New York Times shows that he spends his time calling every facet of the entertainment industry problematic, from the Oscars to the Super Bowl to the Grammys. Oddly enough, sandwiched in the middle of these pieces of shit, is an article reviewing Taylor Swift's documentary on Netflix which praises her as the second coming. So not only is he smug, but he's also a smug gay with terrible taste. Who'd have thunk?

It’s over. Forget about it

Here are his top performances of 2019, some of which include the entire cast of The Prom as well as Kelly Clarkson. Needless to say he has the taste of an artiste.

Raise your hand if you are shocked there are a bunch of white people in movies

Who the was the casting agent for the presenters, they are the ones needing a talking to. The SNL cast needs to stay off all award shows, their routines are just not funny anymore.

"Overlooked, unseen, under-medicated, Joker, and eventually his disciples, discover that being a guy with a carnival-ready white face helps get him the attention he wants. And even though this is the only movie of the bunch (the only non-Korean, Hitler-free movie) to feature even remotely meaningful parts for nonwhite actors (a bunch of Latinos beat up Joker in the opening minutes; his social worker and neighbor are black women), guess what: He kills a lot of them!"

Why do SJW pontificators always trot this out---"A POC was killed in a movie with over-the-top comic book violence!"? Are they actually offended by this?

I thought the phrase "we need to talk" went out of fashion years ago.