The article was originally published on Sirp in Estonian, on April 16, 2021, just before the 2021 Oscar Awards Ceremony
The four Oscars “Parasite” won last year sent ripples across the whole movie industry, with the initial surprise giving its way into a plethora of questions about how something like that happened (not to mention former President’s Trump bewilderment) . Evidently, the team around “Parasite” did tremendous job promotion/lobbying-wise, “exploiting” the charisma of both Bong Joon-ho and Kang Ho-song (and of Sharon Choi, who acted as the translator) but the question remains on how a group of people (the Academy) that back in 2016 faced controversy over a second straight year of all-white Oscar acting nominations, ended up voting for a Korean movie. Subsequently, another set of question arises. Is the Academy above racism now? Will we see more Asian productions receiving awards or was “Parasite” just an anomaly? And how does the whole issue with the recent racist attacks against Asian Americans is connected with all the above and the controversy around the nomination of “Minari” and “Better Days“? Let us take things from the beginning though.
Although the outcry for the representation of non-Caucasians in the nomination has been going for years, the voices started becoming more intense in 2015, after the Academy nominated the acclaimed Martin Luther King biopic “Selma” for Best Picture, but not its director, Ava Duvernay, nor its star, David Oyelowo. In response, the activist April Reign started the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, a term critics took up to challenge the awards’ persistent whiteness. As more and more people started taking a closer look at both the roster of the Academy and the way the nominations were decided, a number of rather shocking facts came to the fore, particularly during 2016: of the Academy’s 6.241 voting members, 92% were white and 75% male. Latinos made up only two percent of the Academy’s membership, while the U.S. Hispanic population topped 17 percent. Asians and Native Americans together made up less than half a percent. In the same year, a study by the Communication and Marketing department in USC Annenberg showed that the issues the Academy faced were not exclusive, but part of a more general attitude towards minorities and foreigners that extended to the whole of Hollywood. Furthermore, another study of the same year, this time by the UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, showed that the industry might be losing millions due to its exclusivity practices, which probably factored at least as much for the changes that took place during 2016, as the social outcry.
The same year, after a unanimous vote, the Board’s Membership and Administration Committee took a number of decisions that would eventually change the whole organization and, arguably, led to what happened with “Parasite”, in an effort “to make the Academy’s membership, its governing bodies, and its voting members significantly more diverse. The Board’s goal is to commit to doubling the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020.” These changes included a more closely inspection of the status of current members, whose membership would not be renewed if they have not been active in motion pictures during the previous decade. Furthermore, and more importantly, “the Academy will supplement the traditional process in which current members sponsor new members by launching an ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity.” Lastly, “In order to immediately increase diversity on the Board of Governors, the Academy will establish three new governor seats that will be nominated by the President for three-year terms and confirmed by the Board. The Academy will also take immediate action to increase diversity by adding new members who are not Governors to its executive and board committees where key decisions about membership and governance are made“.
Chris Rock hosted the Oscar ceremony that followed on February, and the effort to deliver a message about diversity was more than evident. At the same time, however, some rather unfortunate jokes about Asians were still uttered during the night, with particularly one involving children with oriental appearance posing as accountants, leading the Asian Academy members to demand an apology and the organization being forced to issue one. Furthermore, the invitation for new members in 2016 was extended to 683 artists, with 272 of them being people of color, and among those, 70 Asian or Asian American, including the likes of Lee Byung-hun (S. Korea), Tatsuya Nakadai (Japan) and Cary Joji Fukunaga. It is also worth mentioning that the number of invitees was a record one, something that continued in the next years. In 2017, the Academy invited 774 new members, representing 57 countries, 39% of whom were women and 30% people of color, marking a 331% increase from 2015 to 2017. The invitation was extended to the likes of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (India), Maggie Cheung (Hong Kong), Jiang Wen (China), the late Irrfan Khan (India), Tony Leung (Hong Kong), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Ann Hui (Hong Kong), Brillante Mendoza (Philippines), the late Kim Ki-duk (S. Korea) and many others. The numbers continued to increase, and in 2018, the Academy issued 928 invitations, with 49% being women and 38% people of color. In 2019, there was a slight decrease, with the invitations dropping to 842, of whom 50% were women and 29% people of color. This brought the overall number of members to over 9000, from the 6241 of 2016, with this roster being the one that awarded “Parasite”.
The rather intense change the Academy struggled to implement became more evident than ever; however, despite the unprecedented success of the S. Korean film, the shouts against the Academy did not stop, with the critique this time turning on the fact that none of the film’s actors was nominated for an Oscar. The Hollywood Diversity Report that was released on February 2020 by the University of California highlighted the issue in the most eloquent fashion: films featuring largely Asian casts have received Academy recognition. But while “Last Emperor,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Life of Pi” all received more than five Oscar nominations, none was for acting. On the topic, Ben Zauzmer, author of “Oscarmetrics”, mentioned “Historically and to the present day, the academy is more willing to honor films with Asian casts than to honor individual Asian actors.” Elaine Kim, a professor emerita of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UCB, mentioned another aspect, that of “whitewashing”, “Until recently, many Americans thought that Asians were foreigners who could never be considered ‘American,’ so naturally it would be jarring, they thought, for white viewers to see Asians portraying ‘Americans’ on the silver screen even as black Americans were coming to be thought of as quintessentially ‘American. Asian and Asian Americans couldn’t even play themselves, the assumption being that talented acting belongs to white, Western actors. That has also infused the industry’s consciousness, as well as of the general public“. It is also worth noting that the whole issue with American actors playing Asians was the source of much critique also in 2016, particularly due to the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi in the live action “Ghost in the Shell” movie and of Tilda Swinton as the “Ancient One”, a character of Tibetan origin, in the film adaptation of “Doctor Strange”. Another viral hashtag, #whitewashedOUT, was established at the time, resulting in a number of explanations from Hollywood executives, which did not convince many though.
The Academy’s efforts continued, nevertheless, and in the class of 2020, announced on June 30 of that year, the 819 invitees were 45% women, 36% underrepresented ethnic/racial communities and 49% international from 68 countries. At the same time, the Academy announced that its 2016, aforementioned initiative that aimed to double the number of women and underrepresented ethnic/racial communities by 2020, surpassed both its goals. Lastly, a new initiative titled Academy Aperture 2025 was also announced, in order to “further the dialogue and challenge our history to create a more equitable and inclusive community.”. Essentially, the initiative aims at extending the efforts of the Academy to the whole of the Hollywood industry, by focusing “on the systemic changes that need to occur in areas such as casting, screenwriting, producing, directing, financing and greenlighting of movies in order to afford opportunities to women and people of color and to help create a new narrative for recovery.”
The next point of friction regarding Asian representation would come from “Minari”, a film that has earned six nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards, most of which seem to address a number of aforementioned issues. Lee Isaac Chung nominated for Best Director and Best Original screenplay, is a son of Korean immigrants who was born in Denver. Steven Yeun, who is nominated for Best Actor, is a Korean American who was born in Seoul by Korean parents, before moving to Canada when he was 4 years old, and a bit later to the US, where he grew up. Youn Yuh-jung, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actress is a Korean. Overall, “Minari” seems like a direct hit towards whitewashing, something that did not bothered the Hollywood Foreign Press association, who organize the Golden Globe Awards, to nominate it as a foreign movie. The decision was based on a rule that states that only films with 50% or more of their dialog in English are eligible to compete in the awards’ Best Motion Picture categories, something that, evidently, does not apply to the Oscars. The outcry for this decision was quite intense but also rather layered. For starters, the US has no official language and more than 20% of the US population age 5 and over speaks a language other than English at home, according to census data, something that deems the particular rule of the Golden Globes, unsuitable, to say the least. At the same time, around that time, it was revealed that the Association, although it includes a few people of Asian descent among its 87 members, it does not include any Black people. Even more importantly though, it came in the middle of a surge of racist attacks against AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) which increased from 2.600 to 3.795 from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021, roughly the period of the pandemic, with 11,1% involving physical assault. Largely the result of a rhetoric that blames Asians and particularly Chinese for the spread of the virus, something that Trump also embraced repeatedly, these attacks have even increased in the latest month, with the repeated assaults, even against the elderly, being a frequent phenomenon and the Atlanta mass shooting highlighting the problem in the most shocking way. The seriousness of these events became even more apparent, when President Biden announced, on March 29, a number of steps by the federal government to combat racist violence.
To return to the “Minari” controversy, in my opinion, as a film critic specializing in Asian cinema, the film is distinctly American in both context and aesthetics, with only the language and the appearance of the majority of the protagonists pointing to an Asian production. This problem, however, brings to the fore another issue, that of the film’s origin, a concept that has been intensely debated recently, due to the ever-growing number of co-productions between companies of different countries. This brings us to another point of controversy, which also shows the political implications that surround the Oscars extend much further than the country. The Hong Kong nomination for Best International Feature Film, “Better Days” is directed by Hong Kongese Derek Tsang, but the protagonists are Chinese, the script is based on a Chinese novel, and the setting is mainland China. These aspects have made a lot of local Hong Kongese to lash out against the selection, in the middle of an intense clash between Hong Kong and China that has been going on for years. At the same time, the controversy behind “Better Days” extends to other aspects, since the author of the original novel, Jiuyue Xi was accused for plagiarism, notably for including parts that look rather similar with Keigo Higashino‘s “Journey Under the Midnight Sun”. Furthermore, the sudden withdrawal from Berlinale back in February 2019, the canceling from its mainland China release in June and the rumors about rewriting, and its subsequent release in October, a date that allowed the film to be nominated for the 2021 Oscars (eligibility for the 2020 Best International Feature Films nomination was from 1 October 2019 to 31 December 2020, while for the 2019 edition, 1 October 2018 to 30 September 2019) and not clash with “Parasite”, added more oil to the fire. To cement the issue as a whole, a few days ago, TVB, the largest free-to-air broadcaster, opted not to air the Oscars in the first time in over 50 years. The spokeperson of the channel mentioned that it was a commercial decision, but the wide belief is that the decision was the result of pressure of the mainland government, as a response to the nomination of the short documentary “Do Not Split”, which explores the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, as well as ongoing official unease over past statements attributed to Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao, who is nominated in the Best Director category for “Nomadland”. The irony of the Oscars not screening neither in Hong Kong nor in mainland while directors from both are nominated is hard to escape.
To return to our main point and to synopsize: evidently, the Academy and subsequently, the Hollywood movie industry, have taken big steps since 2016 against racism and in favor of equality. However, the political and racism issues that surrounds such an impactful event and organization are still at large, extending far beyond even the country, and the effect these changes have outside of the movie industry is less significant than the people who work within it (I include myself here) would like to think, as the increase on racist crime proves. That is a topic for another time, though.
