In 2015, Warners Bros. expected their big Oscar player to be Black Mass. Directed by Scott Cooper, the man behind below-the-line successes Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace, and starring Johnny Depp in what appeared to be his first substantial role in some time, the narrative to push was pretty clear. That it was also about organized crime – a favorite subject with awards bodies – and featured lauded character actors Julianne Nicholson and Joel Edgerton in meaty supporting roles, was like the icing on the cake. Except, as Warner Bros. soon learned: when the cake is no good, the icing is pretty meaningless. A tour-de-force from Depp and some showy makeup work notwithstanding, Black Mass failed to earn a single Oscar nomination.
The film received lukewarm reviews and, despite intense campaigning from Depp in particular, was met with indifference among the industry. Warner Bros. shifted its focus as fast as they could to Mad Max: Fury Road, which eventually caught a wave of critics’ awards to a double-digit haul of Oscar nominations. The third movie on their radar – as in, the one that never really got a campaign to begin with – was Creed. Its absence from the list of Academy Award nominations, aside from white supporting actor Sylvester Stallone, was one of the more potent drivers of the systemic racism accusations which were hurled at voters and the industry at large. Those claims remain widespread – and controversial.
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This is the second year in a row that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has neglected to include a single performer of color among its 20 acting nominees. Naturally, the calls to action – or perhaps more accurately, reaction – have turned louder and more passionate. AMPAS responded last week by instituting aggressive new measures to diversify its membership: by 2020, or within the next four years, President Cheryl Boone Isaacs revealed the goal of doubling the amount of women and people of color represented as voters. Reaching that still wouldn’t equate proportionate representation – around a quarter of members are women and less than 3 percent are black – so anyone calling the measures “drastic” or “unfair” is, to put it kindly, a little misguided.
Many say that the Academy is ultimately tasked with reflecting the industry and that, thus, its white slate of nominees is reflective of an industry problem. Hollywood does have a problem, considering that the only contending films without a majority-white cast were Beasts of No Nation, Creed and Straight Outta Compton – between which only three white artists were nominated – but the journey of a movie like Creed is also demonstrative of how the Oscars can lead the industry. Many Oscar pundits – even those most critical of the Academy’s apparent racial bias – concede that Creed would have likely been a major player in Picture, Lead Actor and other categories had it been taken more seriously by Warner Bros. With a rising star in Michael B. Jordan leading the cast, and a rising star in Ryan Coogler behind the camera – and, later, with the movie getting great reviews and doing great business – it’d seem like an ideal awards vehicle.
Systemic racism can be habitual. Black Mass seemed like the better movie to campaign in no small part because the ingredients considered “Academy-friendly” were also, well, white. In retrospect, Creed would have been the best play for the studio – reviews were stronger, business was more robust and the awards potential, from veteran Stallone to upstart Jordan, was certainly better – but there’s a pervasive preconception of what an Oscar movie looks like.
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For this campaign season, Universal also had a movie that looked like Black Mass. The studio’s big push was initially Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, but after the hot biopic turned out to be a box office disaster, Straight Outta Compton emerged as Universal's primary play by November. For the record: if Compton was included in Best Picture, it’d be the worst-reviewed, least-nominated of the bunch. Plus, from its style to its largely unknown cast, the movie didn’t “feel” like an Oscar movie – and yes, racial bias can explain that to a point.
But in this case, those limitations only showed the power of campaigning. Straight Outta Compton is now the first film in a decade to receive top nominations from the Producers Guild of America (PGA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and not come away with an Oscar nod for Best Picture. With the healthy amount of crossover membership between those groups and the Academy, it’s safe to say that Compton was not far behind. Given the aforementioned hurdles, that the film was so prominent in the race demonstrates rather clearly what faith from a studio can accomplish.
In the end, for a company like Universal or Warner Bros., it’s about the bottom-line. The idea of what an Academy movie looks like, sounds like or feels like is indisputably discriminatory right now, and that way of thinking is something that must be contested. The success of Compton shows that those assumptions can be challenged – and the failure of Creed exemplifies why it’s so essential to do so. Like the Academy, the “industry” is not a monolith: every studio, every year, has different priorities and opportunities. When production is about the bottom-line, influential organizations like the Academy can – and do – assert what that bottom-line looks like. It’s why advocacy for more inclusivity is so important.
But that requires a change in thinking for critics and audiences, too. See, voters and distributors aren’t the only ones taking mental cues from what appears awards-friendly and what doesn’t. Though pop culture journalists have been among the most outraged on social media, the data shows that they – I guess I should say “we” – are equally culpable in this epidemic of representation. Metacritic has aggregated the year-end film awards bestowed by over 54 organizations – 39, or the great majority, of which are regional or national critics’ groups. According to Metacritic's objective tally of each organization’s selections, no person of color would be nominated for an acting award. Neither Creed nor Straight Outta Compton nor Beasts of No Nation would be particularly close to the Top 10 of Best Picture choices. This is despite the fact that Idris Elba was nominated by SAG, the Independent Spirit Awards and BAFTA – all industry groups. This is despite the fact that Compton was far more popular among industry groups than critics groups.
I don’t mean to give the Academy or other industry voters too much credit – what many members have said in response to the controversy is beyond disturbing – but the issue is undoubtedly more complicated than mere finger-pointing. Critics’ groups are mostly white and male, too. That they follow the narratives and messages dictating which movies to pay attention to, as transmitted by studios and AMPAS, does not indicate individual bias. But it does lead to a collective bias. It’s something that moviegoers, from audiences to critics to voters to decision-makers, need to awaken to. I’m happy to credit AMPAS for taking the first decisive step.