Conventional Oscar Wisdom Has an Almost All-White Best-Actress Lineup—For No Reason - News

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Videos can use content-based copyright law contains reasonable use Fair Use (  Predicting the Oscar nominations is a strange nonscience. A bunch of us see the movies (at least, I hope we do) and use a combination of our own instincts, our knowledge of Oscar history, our hunches about voter patterns and, in some cases, our conversations with a small and often unrepresentative sampling of Oscar voters, and we make lists. We announce our favorites, our maybes, and our long shots, the people who run Academy Awards campaigns pay much more attention than they should, and that in turn can trickle down to the allocation of campaign resources. In no time at all—and often, long before some of the movies even reach theaters—guesswork can calcify into conventional wisdom, and battles seem to be won or lost much sooner than they should be. But have our long-standing methods caught up to the reality of an Academy with a drastically altered membership whose tastes we don’t yet fully know? Or are we operating from the inaccurate premise that the average Oscar voter is pretty much who he or she was 10 years ago—and therefore reinforcing that status quo? If you want to know how troubling these conventions can be, look no further than this year’s best-actress race—a contest that currently involves four white actors, one Asian actor, and three black actors, and one in which, all too predictably, the prevailing belief seems to be that all four white actors are in, and that all four actors of color are vying for one remaining slot. At the prediction-aggregation site Gold Derby, which has amassed the guesses of 30 Oscar pundits, the field is currently ranked as follows:Renée Zellweger, JudyScarlett Johansson, Marriage StorySaoirse Ronan, Little WomenCharlize Theron, BombshellAwkwafina, The FarewellCynthia Erivo, HarrietAlfre Woodard, ClemencyLupita Nyong’o, Us This is how a narrative gets entrenched: There are those who are in, and those who are fighting to get in, and the implicit notion of a quota—the idea that there is one spot for “diversity”—becomes a way of not looking at the performances. Let’s look at the four actors presumably competing for one spot. Lupita Nyong’o is an Oscar winner who received rave reviews for a movie that, when all is said and done, may well have outgrossed the other seven films on this list combined. Cynthia Erivo is a Tony-winning actor and singer who plays an important historical figure in a film that has outperformed expectations at the box office. Awkwafina stole her scenes in a comedy smash last year and has now pivoted to drama in one of the summer’s breakout indie successes. And Alfre Woodard is a beloved veteran who received her only other nomination 36 years ago, has finally gotten to carry a movie, and in fact took it straight to the Grand Jury Prize at January’s Sundance F

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