#oscars so white

[clownboy-like-me]

They really watched a movie about a mother travelling through endless universes to save and connect with her depressive daughter and choose to give the oscar for best supporting actress to the tax auditor?????

[kirajw]

Angela Bassett was robbed.  Again.   We ride at dawn.

[magickgirl786]

anyone who is like “its good angela didn’t win because the oscars shouldn’t bow down to capitalism and give everyone awards for marvel movies” i’m just like ???

because when exactly did we want EVERYONE in a marvel movie to be nominated for an oscar let alone win one?

angela has been the only one i thought did a good enough job in a marvel movie to warrant being nominated for an oscar and just because she’s in a marvel film does not mean she shouldn’t be honoured for her amazing performance

eeaao is a comedy, sci-fi and action film and years ago, there would have been people saying “ugh this genre is not oscar worthy gtfo” and now it won best picture and many other oscars which just shows that pretentious film bros need to stop gatekeeping the cinema represented at awards shows 

so if you’re one of those people who think its good that angela lost because she was in the marvel superhero genre and that jamie lee won even though she had a much more minimal role in a comedy sci-fi action gnre, just stfu and say you’re racist

[fanhackers]

Naatu Naatu–Not My Oscar Win

Much before Naatu Naatu won the Oscars for Best Song, Screen Junkies made an honest trailer for RRR. It was the first time I’d seen an Indian film—a non-Bollywood, South-Indian film at that—take up western media attention, at least on YouTube. It was a fun trailer for a fun movie; it would not be a stretch to say I enjoyed it. Then, Naatu Naatu was nominated for an Oscar. The director of the film, S.S.Rajamouli, went on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and very gently corrected the very white host when he called the film Bollywood, because it is not. The Oscars happened, Naatu Naatu won, and India—the pan-India upper-caste crowd—rejoiced for taking the global stage, never mind that “pan-India” is a contentious term that flattens out the regional diversity present in India.

As of today, there are 269 fanfics on AO3 for RRR, of which 252 are written in English. To be sure, that is more than a lot of fandoms produce on AO3 for desi media. I would not personally categorize RRR as a desi film, but it’s not not desi either. It was representation on a global stage; for a moment, the desi identity, held up against that of the Western gaze, burned bright, and a lot of desis, both in India and the diaspora, felt seen and perceived.

In her introduction to the edited essay collection, Fandom, Now in Color, Rukmini Pande talks about the ways in which race becomes an issue in fandom and fan studies only in so much as we talk about racialized media:

“…the discipline of fan studies itself has constructed a default referent for that term [fandom]—mostly white fans located in the US and UK and organized around categories like transnational and global fandom and seen to be somewhat othered by language, geographical location, or media text—K-pop fans in Brazil or fans of Star Trek in Russia, for example (Madrid-Morales and Lovric 2015; Mikhaylova 2012).” PANDE, RUKMINI. “INTRODUCTION.” IN FANDOM, NOW IN COLOR, 1-13. IOWA CITY: UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS, 2020.

RRR, as a film, was a story about two freedom fighters who fought against the British rule in India—two very real freedom fighters, whom the director has admitted the film is not historically accurate about. The optics of it stand out; that, at a moment where anti-racist work seems so imminent, the award went to a song from a movie about a colonial struggle, without truly dealing with the after-effects of such a struggle on most “third-world” countries.

I don’t honestly know what connections I am drawing with this. I’ve been using Pande’s work as a way to reframe my own complex feelings about RRR winning, given the accusations of casteism S.S.Rajamouli has faced across his career, the ways in which the pan-India films have often been repackaged Bollywood, and the internal politics of South-Indian (here, specifically Telugu) identities getting melted into a singular Indian identity on a global stage with no context for the histories of these lived experiences. I’m not quite sure where I’ve arrived, but what do you think?

[mickeymousefan4life-blog]

So true, and so sad!!!!!!! 😞

[agentem]

Do you ever think about how Samuel L. Jackson was given a lifetime achievement Academy Award (by Denzel Washington, no less) and the Academy decided not to air it in the Primetime Broadcast, and randomly get mad about it all over again even though it happened more than a year ago?

[griks-fabulous-adventure]

Yea no, my one take about the Oscars 2023 is gonna be: Jamie Lee Curtis winning over Stephanie Hsu is some racist bullshit.

[miss-vortex]

"When it comes to the Oscars, maybe we have to accept that the steps to genuine inclusivity are slow and gradual. There have undoubtedly been improvements in comparison to a decade ago; but when there's talent from only one or two marginalised groups represented each year it feels like it's one step forward, two steps back.

As the oldest and most popular awards show the Academy Awards has a duty to use its platform to give a voice to those who have previously felt silenced."

[blackboxoffice]

Resounding success of ‘Black Panther’ franchise says little about the dubious state of Black film

by Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Assistant Professor, Media Studies, Wake Forest University

When Marvel Studios released “Black Panther” in February 2018, it marked the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film to feature a Black superhero and star a predominantly Black cast.

Its estimated production budget was US$200 million, making it the first Black film – conventionally defined as a film that is directed by a Black director, features a Black cast, and focuses on some aspect of the Black experience – ever to receive that level of financial support.

As a scholar of media and Black popular culture, I was often asked to respond to the resounding success of that first “Black Panther” film, which had shattered expectations of its box office performance.

Would it lead to more big-budget Black films? Was its popularity an indication that the global marketplace – the real source of trepidation about the film’s potential – was finally ready to embrace Black-cast films?

With the release of the massively successful “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” in November 2022, I expect those questions to reemerge.

Yet as I review the cinematic landscape between the original and its sequel, I am inclined to restate the answer I gave back in 2018: Assumptions should not be made about the state of Black film based on the success of the “Black Panther” franchise.

Reason for optimism

Prior to its release, the producers of “Black Panther” faced questions about whether there was a market for a Black blockbuster film, even one ensconced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

After all, since the Wesley Snipes-led “Blade” trilogy, which came out in the late-1990s and early 2000s, Black superhero films had experienced diminishing returns. There was one notable exception: the commercially successful, though heavily panned “Hancock” (2008), starring Will Smith.

Otherwise, Black superhero films such as “Catwoman” (2004) and “Sleight” (2016) either flopped or had a limited release.

Furthermore, until “Black Panther,” no Black film exceeded a $100 million budget, the average benchmark for modern Hollywood blockbusters.

Nonetheless, despite these early concerns, “Black Panther” earned the highest domestic gross, $700 million, of all films released in 2018, while earning $1.3 billion in worldwide gross, second only to “Avengers: Infinity War.”

“Black Panther” emerged at the tail end of what many industry experts considered to be a surprisingly successful run of Black films, which included the biopic “Hidden Figures” (2016) and the raunchy comedy “Girls Trip” (2017). Despite their modest budgets, they earned over $100 million apiece at the box office – $235 million and $140 million, respectively.

However, both films were mostly reliant on the domestic box office, especially the R-rated “Girls Trip,” which was only released in a handful of foreign markets. Conventional wisdom has long held that Black films will fail abroad. International distributors and studios typically ignore them during the presale process or at film festivals and markets, reasoning that Black films are too culturally specific – not only in terms of their Blackness, but also their Americanness.

Films like “Black Panther” and the Oscar winning “Moonlight” (2016), which earned more on the international market than the domestic market, certainly challenged those assumptions. It has yet to upend them.

Black films after ‘Black Panther’

What do those Black films released in theaters in the nearly five years between “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” tell us about the former’s impact?

The simple answer is that the original “Black Panther” has had no discernible influence on industry practices whatsoever.

Since 2018, no other Black blockbuster has emerged, save for the sequel itself. Granted, Black filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s remake of “A Wrinkle in Time” (2018) reportedly cost an estimated $100 million; however, while Black actors portrayed the protagonist and a few other characters, the film features a multicultural ensemble cast – which, as scholars such as Mary Beltran have pointed out, has become the primary strategy for achieving diversity in film.

Even if one were to include “A Wrinkle in Time,” the grand total of Black films with budgets exceeding $100 million is three, with the two “Black Panther” films being the others – all during an era in which there have been hundreds of mainstream films with budgets exceeding $100 million.

Otherwise, most of the Black films released in theaters between 2018 and 2022 typically were low budget by Hollywood standards – $3 million to $20 million in most cases – with only a handful, such as the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect,” costing $50 million to 60 million.

Perhaps the most notable change has been the medium. Many Black films now appear on either cable networks that cater to a Black audience – namely Black Entertainment Television and, more recently, Lifetime – or on streaming services such as Netflix. Tyler Perry, the most popular and prolific Black filmmaker of the modern era, has released his latest films – “A Jazzman’s Blues” (2022), “A Madea Homecoming” (2022) and “A Fall from Grace” (2020) – directly to Netflix.

Furthermore, no other Black film has approached the financial success of “Black Panther.” Granted, several Black films have fared well at the box office, especially relative to their production costs. Foremost among them is Jordan Peele’s “Us” (2019), which cost an estimated $20 million, yet earned approximately $256 million worldwide despite its R rating and the fact that it was never released in China.

Whither Black film

Without question, large budgets and commercial success are not the only measures of a film’s value and significance.

As has historically been the case, Black film has managed to do more with less. The critical acclaim afforded to films such as “BlackKlansman” (2018), “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2019) and “King Richard” (2021) reflect this fact. All reflect trends in contemporary Black filmmaking – comedies, historical dramas and biopics abound, for instance – and were made for a fraction of the cost of both “Black Panther” films.

In truth, the zeal with which some cast “Black Panther” as a bellwether for Black films is part of continued haranguing over their viability, particularly after the #OscarsSoWhite movement that drew attention to the lack of diversity at the 2016 Academy Awards.

However, its positioning as a Disney property within Marvel’s transmedia storytelling effort makes it so atypical that its success — and that of its sequel — portends little about Black film.

[pilesofpillows]

This.

Do I love Jamie Lee Curtis? Sure. But did Stephanie Hsu and Angela Bassett get snubbed? Absolutely.

Look she did great, but she did not have enough relevance or screen time in their movies like Angela Bassett did Queen Ramonda and Stephanie Hsu as Joy.

She did not have an incredibly moving performance, where she’s carrying the scene alone like Angela Bassett or Stephanie Hsu, both who have been widely regarded as having standout scenes in their individual films.

[kirajw]

[popculty]

This whole piece is 🔥🔥🔥 but extra points for these two paragraphs:

“I used to believe that there was hope for the Oscars and the type of art they reward, with Brad Pitt and his production company, Plan B (the company that produced Moonlight), serving as an exemplar of new possibilities. With campaigns for Selma, 12 Years a Slave, and Moonlight, Plan B seemed to signal the vanguard of a more egalitarian Hollywood serious about consistently turning out quality, boundary-pushing work from Black filmmakers and other nonwhite filmmakers. And it was the creation of one of the most well-liked and respected white men in the business, one who didn’t employ the abusive tactics of Miramax co-founder and convicted serial rapist Harvey Weinstein. And then Pitt was credibly accused of abusing his children and his wife during a 2016 private jet trip. He sold his stake in Plan B, where he had occupied a role as an art director of prestige American cinema, to a French media company. In 2020, Pitt’s contemporaries awarded him the Oscar for best supporting actor for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that concludes with Pitt’s character beating two young women to death.

Hollywood had reverted to form, a development confirmed by Green Book winning best picture in 2019 and the I told you look shared between actors Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan when it happened. The win for Moonlight was not the dawning of a new age, but an exception that proved the rule of the academy’s white supremacist system. In the 95-year history of the Oscars, no Black person has won the prize for best director. Only six have ever been nominated, and they’re all men. In the eyes of the academy, talented women with cinematic styles as varied as those of Julie Dash, Dee Rees, Cheryl Dunye, Mati Diop, Janicza Bravo, Kathleen Collins, Regina King, and Alice Diop just … don’t exist.”

[pilesofpillows]

They said it with they whole chests… 😭😭😭

“Hey Auntie…We love you.”

Mike and Jonathan so real for that💜

[masculine-extremity]

The Oscars Favor White-led War Films

It is very clear and it is in one word, racism. People of color in the industry have had opportunities taken away from them because of unfair prejudices that have been made against them. For example, emerging Black actors receive significantly fewer chances early in their careers to make their mark in leading roles, compared with white actors, and they have a lower margin for error. POCs are harshly criticized for stepping into the industry and given little sympathy for what they have to go through. Ultimately, they are driven away and made to feel unworthy of being in the movie industry. With war films, they make a lot of money and viewership because of how action packed they are. Usually we see war films about World War I and II because Hollywood has little to no interest in anything other than those two wars since the US was involved with them. The WWI and WWII stories have been globalized. They’ve captivated people’s minds, making them, most of the time, the only war stories that they know. If they were to produce a war movie that isn’t WWI or WWII, people will have less interest in the movie and it wouldn’t make as much money as expected.

[yrsonpurpose]

happy pride month! 🏳️‍🌈

[anything3anywhere]

puss in boots: the last wish getting that nom is a well-deserved one!