Lily Gladstone endured, with the best of gestures, the moment when Michelle Yeoh read Emma Stone's name as the winner of the Oscar for best actress for her work in Poor creatures. Hollywood was finally going to reward a native American, she was going to star in an act of contrition for decades of producing westerns with good cowboys and redskins portrayed as cruel murderers, insensitive to the civilization brought to them by the white man. And the chosen one was a young actress, with roots arising from the Piesnegros nation and the Nez tribe, the third indigenous person to be a candidate for an acting Oscar. [previamente fueron Keisha Castle-Hughes por Whale Rider en 2004 y Yalitza Aparicio por Roma en 2018]. But on the ballot, stubbornly, only Emma Stone's name appeared. The campaign carried out by the Hollywood Academy, after sweeping the hashtag #OscarSoWhite because in that 2015 edition the 20 candidate performers were Caucasian, has turned, curiously, against Gladstone: there are more foreign voters, of many different types minorities, and to them Hollywood's outstanding debts with the Navajos or the Apaches sound like something distant: they are excited by the artistic corpus that an actress from Arizona and a filmmaker from Athens are building, but Athens the original, that of Greece, not Georgia's.
Nine years ago, the Academy's nearly 6,000 members were 92% white and 75% male. Today the Academy has 10,800 voters, and ethnic minority groups have been preferably invited to enter it. As a result, a fifth of them live outside the United States, and nearly a hundred are Spanish. Nobody knows who votes, although there is the impression that the newcomers are more aware, and may be more active when filling out the ballot. They are certainly sending enough signals to confirm this trend. After the 96th edition, it has become clear: Hollywood will be a state of mind in which white executives triumph, but the Academy is an institution in which doubts regarding the most competitive statuettes were palpably resolved last night always in favor of the probable foreign election. .
If the Mexican Rome perhaps it came too soon, the South Korean parasites, by Bong Joon-ho, was right at the time: in 2020 it became the first non-English language film to win the main prize. The following year, the predictable posthumous Oscar for best actor for Chadwick Boseman, the protagonist of Black Panther, by The mother of the blues, and quite a star in his country, vanished to become Anthony Hopkins' second statuette, thanks to his work in The father. The turn of events surprised even Hopkins himself, who when his name was read at the ceremony was sleeping in his native Wales, where he had returned to visit because, after all, the trophy was going to go to Boseman… Signs of the weight of the non-American voter. At last night's gala, of the five directors nominated in their category, two (Jonathan Glazer and Justine Triet) had achieved it with two examples of European auteur cinema (The area of interest and Anatomy of a fall films that also accumulated five nominations each, among them for best film… another of the records of the last ceremony: for the first time, two feature films not in English competed for the main trophy.
Because that's another one. Since the French Z, by Costa-Gavras, managed to be a candidate for best film in 1970, only 14 foreign feature films (produced outside the United States, and with half or more of the dialogues not in English) have achieved it. And most of it has been obtained in the last editions. If in the 2010s there were about six nominations per gala for foreign titles – eliminating the expressly created section for non-English speaking films or international films – since 2020 the average is 15, and in this edition they have reached 25. More Still: there may not be more industry statuettes, more American ones, than the visual effects and sound ones. Well, those Oscars have gone to, respectively, a Japanese film with a meager budget of 15 million dollars, Godzilla Minus One and The area of interest, whose sound managers came out completely amazed to collect the award at the Dolby theater: yes, the noise and howls of the Nazi machinery are fundamental in this drama about Auschwitz, but the favorite in that section was Oppenheimer.
The trophy for best original screenplay went to a French couple, Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, who, no matter how many Palme d'Ors supported Anatomy of a fall, They were still two strange elements in the middle of the land of the big studios. TO Spider-Man: Crossing the Multiverse has stolen the Oscar for best animated feature The boy and the heron, by Hayao Miyazaki, when the film with the thousands of spider-men and women was leading the bets; Since 2001 when this Oscar was awarded, only two films made by hand and in a language other than English have obtained it and both come from the Japanese genius. And there is still the feature-length documentary category: for the first time in history, none of the five finalists was American (even though in the preselection there was one from Netflix produced by the Obama couple about the African-American musician Julien Baptiste).
Almost half of last night's nominees were not Americans, nor were four of the ten directors of the best picture candidates. Last year he won Everything at once everywhere, a film for the TikTok era starring characters of Asian origin. In this he has made it a more classic film, but about a controversial character from an immigrant family and a leftist past, who suffered the witch hunt, and which was directed by a British-American. And left behind is the drama commanded by a Greek over a Frankenstein feminine in Europe a century ago. The Academy has opted for internationalization, and during awards season, candidates like Martin Scorsese even go through Spain campaigning. The Oscars are clear: go global or die
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