New York magazine's Vulture, one of my favorite pop culture blogs, has a little story up sounding an alarm. The Oscars are in trouble, you see. No, it has nothing to do with the quality of movies released this year (which, generally speaking, is considered to be pretty high). And the concern doesn't have to do with the slate of films yet to hit multiplexes: buzzy films like Gone Girl (review coming this Friday!) and Birdman and Interstellar are all on the not-too-distant horizon. There's been a raft of really solid performances.
The problem, as Kyle Buchanan sees it, is that the Oscars might be, well, too white.
Buchanan's piece ("Will This Be the Whitest Oscar in Years?") is rather devoid of discussion about merit; it reads as a more or less straight-up appeal for quotas. This line, in particular, jumped out at me: "The pressure, then, falls to a handful of Oscar-contending movies that have not yet screened, only two of which are known to have sizable roles for nonwhite actors." "Pressure" is an interesting choice of words. Let's leave aside the risible notion that there should be some magical number of set asides for each race in the Oscar categories and instead focus on that word. There are two ways to interpret his use of "pressure" in that sentence.
The first is that the pressure is on the films to perform: to deliver a product that contains one of the five best performances in the acting categories or is one of the ten best films of the year. The second is that the pressure is on critics and Academy members to give these minority-heavy films a boost, to use their power and their stature to increase the odds of those pictures taking home Oscar night gold regardless of who they feel did the best work in front of the camera or behind.
The first interpretation isn't terribly bothersome. However, given that Buchanan spends a paragraph or two chiding one Oscar pundit for failing to hype a not-yet-released minority-heavy film enough and complaining about Hollywood's failure at "nurturing diversity," I think it's safe to say that he was going for the second option. In short, Buchanan is delivering a warning to the kingmakers in the Academy: no diversity, no peace. "It's a nice little awards show you have here. I'd hate to see something bad—like a raft of think pieces attacking you for white supremacy—happen to it."
Vexing. But not surprising.