The Academy Awards, largely known as the Oscars, approached their 94th year in 2022. The awards are voted on by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — a storied organization essentially created by and for the white male establishment in Hollywood. While we have seen a shift in inclusivity throughout its history, its outdated rules and mindset have created a steeper divide between audiences and the Oscars. The identity crisis between the Oscars as a celebration of Hollywood or a celebration of cinema on a global scale has riddled the ceremony with growing controversy.
For almost a century, the Oscars have promoted the very best that cinema has to offer year in and year out. The annual ceremony awards superlatives to numerous film categories including Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and, of course, Best Picture. These awards are voted on by the Academy, an invitation-only, exclusive Hollywood institution composed of those in the film industry. The membership of the Academy is quite obscure, but throughout its history has been largely white male-dominated. The Academy was essentially created to celebrate the diversity of the industry, but it is the lack of diversity that has affected their relationship with viewers in recent years.
A particularly outdated facet of the Oscars ceremony has been the Best International Feature Film category. In 2019, this category was shifted from its previous title of “Best Foreign Language Feature” in response to growing backlash. The Oscars have included a category for foreign-language films since 1956, but it wasn’t until 2020 that we saw America take a backseat in the Best Picture category.
The Academy’s recent efforts to rework the category has left viewers with mixed feelings, MU film professor Ramsay Wise discussed this change.
“Changing the category’s name from ‘foreign language’ to ‘international’ on the one hand seems to want to remedy the language issue and put it more on national origin, but it still wants to preserve the Hollywood-first status, the rest of the world second,” Wise said.
Director Bong Joon Ho’s unprecedented Oscar sweep with his film “Parasite” saw the Academy make its first major stride toward representing film on a global scale. Nevertheless, the Academy’s ambiguous categorization and rules against international films have emphasized its lingering miscues at handling these films.
The Academy’s definition of an International Feature is “a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the United States of America and its territories with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track.”
Other eligibility restrictions include that the creative control is in the hands of residents or citizens of the residing country, the film must have a traditional theatrical release outside the U.S. and, most notably, that each country submits its single best film to the Academy.
These eligibility rules provide a substantial gray area that has caused many great films to be snubbed. Recently, Nigeria made its first-ever Oscar submission with 2018’s “Lionheart.” This was a monumental moment for a country largely underrepresented in the film industry. However, the Academy’s predominantly non-English language restriction disqualified the film. Nigeria’s colonized history has resulted in it being a predominantly English-speaking culture, something that “Lionheart” represents. This snub underlines the major problem with how this category functions — the Academy’s attempt to define “foreignness.”
“I think in some ways it might not be possible for the Oscars to truly be a ‘global’ award ceremony, ” Wise said, “there are just too many nations making films, and the Oscars will always be, at some level, unavoidably about Hollywood more than anything else.”
While the Academy remains ingrained in its sense of Hollywood exceptionalism, the global shift in the film industry has raised an interesting question for the ceremony: Who do these awards represent?
The demand for increased representation in the film industry has taken over consumers in the wake of streaming. Even in its International Feature Film category, the Oscars have been reluctant to show diverse representation. Out of the 68 awards given for international films over the history of the Oscars, 57 have been European. This problem bleeds into other categories — the amount of actors in international films nominated for Best Actor roles is only around 5% throughout the Oscars’ history.
The Oscars is the biggest film ceremony in the world, averaging around 36 million viewers per year since 2000 (the next closest ceremony is the BAFTAs, which averages around 2.5 million viewers), and the Academy’s reluctance to shift its narrow perspective is an irresponsible reflection of its position in the film industry.
Audiences have expressed their concern with the Academy, MU freshman film major Lily Franck noted why this problem matters.
“It’s important to amplify other perspectives, especially when you’re supposed to represent the voice of what the best movies are right now,” Franck said.
The Academy seems to be in a strange conundrum of grappling with demands of representation and remaining an exclusive body that might prevent that. Though the increase in female and minority Academy membership has shown a progressive shift in addressing the problem, the Oscars are far from being a truly representative celebration of cinema.
Progress takes time, but with the growing market and accessibility to global cinema, the Oscars finds itself scurrying to adapt. Its handling of foreign films and actors has been nothing more than lackluster. As it juggles its identity crisis in 2022, the world will be keeping a close eye on its biggest film stage.
Edited by Shannon Worley, sworley@themaneater.com
