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Academy Awards 2021: A whole new groove

2021-04-27T18:37:41.270Z


The moment when the Academy Awards turned into a black house party: The Academy Awards have never been so liberatingly diverse, so woke and feminine. This exceptional show is welcome to become the rule.


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The Oscars have never been so diverse: Daniel Kaluuya, awarded as best male supporting actor

Photo: Pool / Getty Images

The 93rd Academy Awards will go down as a milestone in Hollywood history. Mainly because, of course, because of the ongoing corona pandemic, she had to forego a lot of staging force and glamor: Hardly any audience in the hall, a lot of distance, no live performances of nominated songs, many nominees and award winners that could only be switched on via video. The 93rd Academy Awards were an exceptional award ceremony. But much of what was born out of necessity that evening in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles may also become the rule in the future.

In a way, this Oscar show was a kind of reset, the resetting of an industrial machine that had been running reliably for almost a century, following its own rhythm.

Until a global virus on the one hand, and a changing social landscape on the other, brought them out of sync.

Since last night she has a new groove, it is more diverse, it is blacker and more Asian, less monocultural and yes, it is less white and male dominated.

An Oscar Academy in flux

Never before in history have so many

People of Color been nominated

in so many different award categories. Nine of the 20 nominees in the acting categories this year weren't sure what a step forward compared to 2015 and 2016, when the lack of diversity provoked the #OscarSoWhite protest campaign. But it is also true: not all of them won an Oscar in the end, Andra Day and Viola Davis were defeated by Frances McDormand, as was the posthumously nominated Chadwick Boseman, surprisingly Anthony Hopkins. Precisely this last decision, probably because the show producers had also been counting on Boseman's victory in such an unorthodox way, took the ceremony from an emotional climax and left it to an irritatingly blunt end.

But the change in the Academy, the gradually increasing diversity within this 10,000-member body that awards the Oscars, which are still the most important film awards in the world, has been very clearly felt in the nominations alone this year.

Some of the winners of this evening are also symbolic figures of this change:

  • Daniel Kaluuya, who won for his highly political portrait of the Black Panther thought leader Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah.

  • the Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung from "Minari", who is only the second Asian since 1957 to receive an Actress Oscar

  • Chloé Zhao, the first Chinese woman and the second woman ever to win the directing Oscar - and she wasn't the only female competitor in her category, for the very first time in Oscar history.

  • Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson, the first black women to win an Oscar in the make-up and hairstyling category, together with their Latino colleague Sergio Lopez-Rivera for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a film about anti-racism Black man who almost won most of the evening's prizes

  • Emerald Fennell, the first woman to win a screenplay Oscar since 2007.

  • the pianist Jon Batiste, who, together with Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, wrote the Oscar-winning soundtrack for the also award-winning Pixar film »Soul«, an animated, swinging musical about a black jazz musician.

So many black or non-white people have never been on stage on an Oscar night, regardless of whether they have been nominated, received awards or presented prizes and program items.

That and the partly moving

acceptance speeches, which dealt

with the

black experience

or, as with Chloé Zhao, appealed to the kindness and human cohesion, all of this was an emotional spectacle that consoled the lack of pomp and pathos.

more on the subject

Oscars in the Pandemic: The Funeral of Old Hollywood

Two scenes are exemplary of this readjustment, this new beginning of the Oscars. The first was the beginning of this show, carefully staged by director Steven Soderbergh: The station concourse, also a symbol of departure, had been furnished with many small niches and tables for four, almost like in Hollywood's early days, when the Oscars were still a small, intimate dinner club weren't a global entertainment event. Only that at the beginning of the 20th century it would still have been impossible for a black woman to open the evening on stage. Regina King, Oscar-winning actress and debut director with "One Night in Miami", appeared self-confident and unapologetic: She was aware that many people get annoyed by the remote control when political sermons are given at the Oscars, she said,but as the mother of a black son, she knows the fear so many have to live with. No fame, no fortune could change that.

Crazy as well as steeped in history

King was the first to address the issue of racism and police violence against blacks that night: “We mourn the loss of so many, and I honestly have to say, if things had turned out differently in Minneapolis last week, I might have my high heels exchanged for a pair of walking boots, ”she said belligerently, looking at the conviction in the George Floyd trial.

Since, as in the previous year, there was no presenter, she acted like an artistic director who set the tone of the show: A celebration and appreciation of Black Lives Matter and Afro-American culture.

That culminated in the second significant scene of this Oscars. Shortly before the finale, which, as expected, made »Nomadland« the best film of the year, the otherwise stiff-necked and white bread Hollywood ceremony turned into an exuberant black house party when DJ Questlove and comedian Lil Rel Howery played a pop quiz with the hosted guests; of course it was only about Oscar-nominated songs by blacks. The moment when the great actress Glenn Close did a little twerking dance to the hip-hop torso-shaker "Da Butt" from Spike Lee's film "School Daze" was as peculiar as it was full of history.

Maybe just an exception in an exceptional year. Maybe, hopefully, but also an expression of an incipient paradigm shift. The more diverse, feminine and international the Oscars are, the more they will represent the present and future of cinema as a medium for everyone, not just a white majority society, and remain relevant as a mirror of this great art form in all its facets. At some point after this successful, forced restart, the ratings will work again.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-04-27

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