Bury My Oscar At Wounded Knee
Another injustice dealt out by the Academy
Elon Musk took to his X platform to knock the “woke” Academy Awards just minutes into the 2024 ceremony on Sunday. Musk said,
“Winning an Oscar now just means you won the woke contest,”
Musk did not specify what exactly he thought was “woke” about this year’s Oscar-nominated films such as Oppenheimer, which swept away the Oscar awards, or The Zone of Interest, Barbie, or Poor Things — which I personally loathed (see my review below) or Killers Of The Flower Moon.
Musk further reacted to a post about diversity, equity and inclusion rules for the Oscars where the user claimed that DEI makes the award show “less about merit and good movies.”
“When an award is diluted, everyone knows, including those who received it, and it no longer commands respect,” Musk, who has previously gone after DEI initiatives, wrote in another post. I am not sure if Musk actually watched the ceremony but the winners were mostly white people with a split roughly equal between women and men — the only equity in rules for the Oscars actually realized.
There were very few BAME recipients of an Oscar, no disabled either mentally or physically, and none as far as I am aware from the LGBTQ community. And there was one huge glaring elephant in the room — the denial of the Best Actress Oscar for Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon. Instead, Emma Stone took home Best Actress. Well, Elon?
The Lily Gladstone loss was a shock — not least because last month she won the equivalent prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, whose voters heavily overlap with the Oscars’ own. But this was stranger than a bookies’ certainty simply not coming good during the race. This race was over. And already the results were in — Lily Gladstone was the Best Actress by a good head and neck. This new result on Sunday evening smacked to me of a stitch-up or a knobbling of the favourite to win as we say at Cheltenham.
After all, Hollywood has spent the last decade obsessing over diversity to Musk’s obvious displeasure. But here when there was the opportunity to honour a superior piece of acting — above and beyond a mannequin who comes to life — the Academy chose the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the art that keeps Hollywood not just in business but as the nearly 100-year-old creators of this most modern art form. This was the 96th Academy Awards.
As Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon, she holds her own on-screen opposite Leonardo DiCaprio — now if that is not another piece of strong evidence to determine your decision, then what more do you want? Maybe a reminder of the fate of the majestic veteran Cherokee actor Wes Studi who came closest to an Oscar when he was presented with an honorary Academy Award at the 2019 ceremony when he should have been at the very least nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1992 for Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. A performance of such visceral hatred that the film could not have achieved its heroic dialectic — and the epic manifestation of good v evil — without his acting masterclass in revenge, hate, and unrelenting evil.
Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart was perfectly placed to help not just the Academy but white America move past its genocidal entanglement with Native American culture and people. She grew up on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. It could and should have been historic. Not just America needs this — well, the decent parts — but the world needed this.
This would have been a recognition of the victims — past and present — of genocide. And perhaps hope that those who have suffered and still suffer such iniquity and racism will be accorded some future decency and fair treatment. If that is ‘woke’ then Musk you are on the wrong side of history and should go to Mars as soon as you can.
The Academy could finally put a Native American on the winner’s podium who was actually already an acting winner and had been honoured by those who know great acting when they see it and who is a genuine Native American and a woman. There you have a triple whammy covering all the necessary prerequisites for Best Actress.
Yet they flunked their lines and chose the actress pretending to be the Creature from a bizarre reworking of Frankenstein in a feminist iteration. Emma Stone was all show and a faux ‘woke’ that gives Musk his bullets of bigotry to fire at the genuine fair and diverse moments in movie history and award ceremonies.
The genocide in Gaza was the reason why the Academy chose Emma Stone. It was an easy way out. But it was the wrong choice and shows clearly that the Academy played safe and played false — another injustice for the Native Americans to suffer in 2024.