The Oscars, And The Righteous Stupidity Of “Diversity”

People actually believe they can fix the film industry with buzzwords and whining.

I put “diversity” in quotes because the type of diversity I’m excoriating in this article is the buzzword, the brand, the dogma (which I’ve declared war on), and not diversity the concept (which I will fight to the death to preserve).

The Academy Award nominees were recently announced, and because journalists are really more like activists nowadays, there was an expected flood of articles about the lack of “diversity” among those who were picked to participate in the annual televised Hollywood circle jerk.

As I waded through the morass of angry, socially conscious opinions, I noticed a trend that poked its head out from the swill that I’ve yet to see anyone of real importance call attention to.

The trend I recognized was the refusal to explain what actual diversity looks like and why it’s vital in the Oscars in particular, and the film industry in general.

“Diversity” is just this vague, quixotic ideal that we should all strive for without question and can only be brought about with constant loud bitching. If your industry or organization or institution hasn’t quite reached that nebulous model of inclusion yet despite your most rigorous efforts, then prepare a statement with the stale hand-wringing proclamation: “There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Keeping progressive slang ambiguous and malleable is part of what allows wokeness to strangle the fun out of pretty much everything it gets its grubby little mitts on, and the fact that most of these terms are multisyllabic means they have an academic power that makes them harder to criticize. You’re not aware of your white male privilege? That’s really problematic. It’s probably because of your toxic masculinity and white fragility. Take some courses on gender studies and queer theory, you cis-normative patriarchal fascist.

But that shouldn’t stop us normal folks from questioning these words — in fact, their ambiguity and ubiquity should embolden us to dissect the living hell out of them. With any luck, they’ll die on the operating table.

Here.

I’ll go first.

Starting with “diversity”.

Bringing this back to the topic of the Oscar nominees, below are the surprisingly obvious questions I have about the arrogant calls for diversity and the Academy Awards that almost no one seems to bring up:

Why do the Oscars need “diversity” of race, gender, sexuality, etc. in the first place?

I’m all for celebrating films that explore characters and stories not often made by major studios, but it seems like those types of films are made by filmmakers with unique backgrounds and visions, and not necessarily because of their skin pigmentation or what they’ve got between their legs.

Yes, a person’s race, sex, and other aspects of their identity can affect their life experiences and worldviews, but not always. For example, not all black people have the exact same life experience, not all women have the exact same life experience, not all homosexuals have the same life experience, and the same can be said for every single other group.

But adherents of “diversity” make only the most superficial arguments for their case: “If we hire more black filmmakers, we’ll have more films about the black experience.”

The Oscars should celebrate the unique voices of innovative, risk-taking filmmakers, regardless of where they’re from or what they look like or which gender they enjoy sleeping with.

In a Vox article, Aja Romano is stunned by the lack of “color” among the nominees, but never expounds on WHY we need more “color”:

“The nominations include only one actor of color in all four acting categories, Cynthia Erivo (for Harriet). Meanwhile, Awkwafina, fresh off winning a Golden Globe for her acclaimed performance in The Farewell, was not nominated in Lead Actress category for the Oscars. And while Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is nominated for Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, and Best Director — earning historic recognition for South Korea — the film’s stellar ensemble cast was not nominated in the acting categories.”

Color is really important to these non-racists, as you can tell.

Why is it so hard to view filmmakers as individuals and judge them and their work accordingly?

“Diversity” is not about recognizing the talent of individuals — it’s about painting all members of every group with their own respective paintbrushes.

What Does A Truly “Diverse” Academy Awards Nominee List Look Like?

Is it 50% male and 50% female for every category? Then what about trans people? If the goal is to truly inclusive of gender, then what percentage of trans filmmakers should the Academy strive to nominate? In order to achieve such a goal, people of certain identity types will have to be excluded, which doesn’t seem very “inclusive”, does it?

Should the Academy nominate filmmakers to attain a list that reflects the racial demographics of a specific country? If so, then which country? Maybe it shouldn’t be reflective of a specific country’s population, but maybe reflective of the world’s population. But then how do we categorize multiracial people? Global racial demographics are constantly shifting, so how does this model account for that?

If the film industry hired a team of full-time mathematicians working around the clock to concoct the perfect “diversity” theorem, journalists and vicious Twtterists would STILL piss and moan about the lack of “diversity” on that one movie about who gives a shit.

Alisha Haridasani Gupta, in her New York Times article, keeps her vision of a truly diverse Academy Awards characteristically vague:

“Though the academy has tried to diversify, white and male voters still make up the majority of its 9,000-member voting pool, which recommends the final list of nominees and therefore determines which parts of American culture deserve to be canonized. And, for the most part, stories about women still don’t seem to make the cut. In fact, the audience at early screenings of “Little Women,” as Vanity Fair reported, “was overwhelmingly comprised of women” — men weren’t even watching the film.”

Implementing diversity quotas is an idea that’s often bandied about in these conversations, but does no one see the inherent problem of picking people because of their race and sex?

Apparently fucking not.

Why Do Calls For Diversity At The Oscars Only Focus On Immutable Characteristics?

In all of the pleas for diversity that I’ve read so far, not a single one has highlighted the need for celebrating cinema experimenters or radical risk takers.

They’ve only called for diversity of skin color and genitalia.

Get a load of the shit-assery spewed by Dino-Ray Ramos in his Deadline article:

“After making some major strides last year, the nominations for the 92nd Annual Academy Awards are basically #OscarsSo WhitePart 2: #OscarsSoWhiterAndWithMoreMen, a sequel to the hashtag originated in 2015 by April Reign for the lack of diverse nominees. The Academy Awards took the non-inclusive torch that was carried by the BAFTA Awards and the Golden Globes. Only one actor of color were nominated in the major acting categories while women were shut out of Best Director. It was at least refreshing to see John Cho and Issa Rae unveil the nominations early Monday morning because they provided much-needed color to the announcement — both figuratively and literally.”

Journalists have yet to utter such necessary phrases as “we need to celebrate more films that push boundaries” or “we need to recognize talent outside of the studio system.”

No.

It’s always “we need more women” or “we need more people of color”.

No columnist says “All of the Best Picture nominees this year are about World War 2. Where’s the diversity?”

But plenty of columnists say “All of the Best Picture nominees this year are about straight white men. Where’s the diversity”

Why is that?

Oh wait. The answer to that is coming up in the next section.

Why are calls for more “diversity” at the Oscars rooted in bigotry?

I’m about to lay down some blunt trauma truth on you:

Discriminating against white people is still racism.

Discriminating against men is still sexism.

That’s right — most of these calls for “diversity” in the Oscars are blatant displays of bigotry. But in the warped Weltanschauung that is wokeness, hating white people is fine. Hating men is fine.

Hatred of these groups is how you achieve Utopia, you see.

Proponents of “diversity” are woefully ignorant of the blatant bigotry that lurks in the dark corners of these initiatives that prioritize the attributes of filmmakers that they can’t change about themselves — their race, gender, sexuality, etc. — and assign moral values to them. (And to make things even more confusing, these moral values are constantly shifting due to intersectionality, but that’s a rant for another time.)

If you’re a white filmmaker, then step back, because you’ve already had your turn.

If you’re a black filmmaker, then come right in.

Imagine if these races were reversed in this scenario but the sentiments remained the same; it’d be pretty disgusting isn’t it?

In a Vox article, titled The lack of diversity among the 2020 Oscar nominees feels disappointingly familiar, Emily Todd VanDerWerff makes clear her disdain for a huge percentage of the population with an abundance of uses of the term “straight white men” and its variants. Here’s an example of her bigotry-as-tolerance, as well as a few splashes of smugness typical of Woke Folk:

“Though recent Best Picture winners and nominees have included movies like Moonlight (a winner), Black Panther, Lady Bird, and Get Out, the vast majority of films in Hollywood are still made by straight white men, about straight white men. Indeed, the 2020 Best Picture nominee that’s not about a straight white guy that seems like it has the best shot at winning — Parasite — was made not in Hollywood but in South Korea. (The other Best Picture nominee that’s not about a straight white guy, Little Women, was made in the old-fashioned Hollywood studio system.)

…

At the end of the day, the idea that the Oscar nominee slate isn’t particularly diverse is absolutely a problem. But it pales in comparison to how non-diverse Hollywood is as a whole. That’s changing (more big movies were directed by women in 2019 than ever before, for example), but at a glacial pace. And as long as that’s true, the 15 to 20 movies that the Oscars seriously consider are more likely than not to be about — and made by — straight white men.

So, see? The whole system is broken! Glad we figured that out.”

A system in which filmmakers are judged on their skills and experience and not their immutable characteristics is an ideal worth striving towards, and is exemplary of what I mean when I say “diversity as a concept”.

However, that’s not what these pleas for “diversity” entail; instead they’re relying on the simplistic assertion: “We need more women/people of color/LGBTQQIA+ filmmakers because…DIVERSITY.”

What Happens When The Oscars DO Achieve “Diversity”?

If the Academy Awards ever achieve this nonexistent plan for “diversity”, what then? Will strict quotas be implemented during every future Oscar season? Will the Oscars be cancelled indefinitely until the nominee list consists of a rainbow of skin colors, genitals, and sexual preferences?

What about the films that are nominated? Will films that display imagination and ingenuity take a back seat to those whose cast and crew are intersectional?

What happens when the Academy deviates from the Standard of Diversity that’s been imposed on them from on high?

In Tatiana Siegel’s Hollywood Reporter article, we get a peek at the draconian scrutiny that we can expect when the Oscars differ from the norm, courtesy of activist April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag in 2015:

“In the past, the pushback against #OscarsSoWhite was, ‘There just weren’t enough performances to nominate.’ Well, that’s not the case this year. There was a wealth of talent — and not just of black performers but of various marginalized communities — that was overlooked. And it’s really unfortunate. I’m interested in what Hollywood and the Academy are going to do to make the entertainment industry reflect those that support it.”

I don’t think diversity’s most vehement supporters have figured out the endgame in all of their pompous grumbles.

I don’t think they ever will.

None of these critics have put forth any model of what real diversity looks like, and I have a theory why: Wokeness allows you to weaponize words that traditionally had clear cut definitions and reshape them to forward your own agenda, regardless of how incoherent or illogical it is.

Unfortunately, “diversity” is one of those words.

The original intent was noble — ensure that you have a wide variety of voices represented and that everyone has an equal opportunity to be represented — but it has since devolved into some sort of street legal bigotry, and its supporters are too delirious on the contact high of their prodigious Twitter audience to realize the flagrant hatred they’re peddling.

What pisses me off is when this pernicious ideology leaks into film, staining the most important and most popular form of gesamtkunstwerk, and I’m forced to watch helplessly as my favorite filmmakers are shamed for not shoving enough diversity into their films.

What Devotees of Diversity fail to understand is that fighting fire with fire leads to a scorched earth that not even the most robust imagination can survive on.

If we constantly make cinema about the identity of its practitioners, the art form will become another pointless casualty in an ideological war that didn’t need to be declared.

Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the evolution of art would know that no group owns the patent on artistic achievement, that works of staggering sublimity and spirit can come from anyone, from anywhere.

I agree that members of marginalized groups have too often been ignored by formal creative institutions, and that this may still be happening to some extent.

But these appeals for “diversity” are not the answer to the problem. I’d even wager that those who make these appeals don’t even fully understand the problem themselves.

I don’t know.

Maybe we should just stop caring so goddamn much about the Oscars PERIOD.

As the Oscars continue to become more politicized and more self-congratulatory, my feelings about them have begun to more closely align with those of William Friedkin, an Oscar-winning film director and former producer of the ceremony, who once said in 2009 that the Academy Awards are “the greatest promotion scheme that any industry ever devised for itself”.

Shhh! No one tell Billy what’s going on with the Academy Awards now!

Check out my other attempts to call out wokeness in the film industry: