On Landmark Movies, the Oscars and the Uselessness of Media Representation

The Oscars should be about awarding future classics.

Great art is enduring. A classic isn’t a classic because it’s old; it’s a classic because it’s GREAT. Classics aren’t for an elite few — they are for everyone. Oscar winners should be picked according to what has the greatest chances for permanence in our culture, something they’ve not always done.

Does anyone talk about past Best Picture winners like The Hurt Locker or The King’s Speech anymore? Not at all.

But do people talk about The Dark Knight? Fuck yeah. (The Dark Knight was a game-changer in the film industry and is the reason why the Oscars changed their rules to include ten nominees for Best Picture instead of five.)

Do people still talk about Goodfellas? The answer is so obviously yes. (Goodfellas lost Best Picture in 1991 to…Dances With Wolves, a movie that has not aged well, nor does anyone talk about it anymore.)

How about when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing wasn’t even nominated? What about in 1994, the year that Pulp Fiction lost Best Picture to…Forrest Gump? Twenty-five years later, it is clear which movie made the bigger impact on film and pop culture.

I still remember being confused when Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan in 1999. Even as a kid, I knew which film was destined to be a classic. It wasn’t until much later that I found out the reason it won was because Harvey Weinstein threw lavish parties for Academy voters and started a smear campaign against Steven Spielberg.

I could do this all night but I think you get my point.

Forty years on, the 1970s remain the last great era in American movies. “The late teens and 1920s gave us the lyrical flowering of silent movies. The 1930s through the 1950s brought classical American narrative cinema. These were the decades in which every now-familiar genre found its definitive form: westerns, gangster films, screwball comedies and romantic comedies, musicals, war pictures, melodrama, and film noir. By the 1960s those genres calcified, remnants of a familiar past that prevented the now-faltering studios from acknowledging the rapidly changing present. The censorious Production Code was toppling, and the studios knew they had to win the younger, hipper audiences who wouldn’t settle for the old formulas. Suddenly there was space for filmmakers who had grown up on American movies to bring a new realism to the genres they loved: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Brian DePalma, all of these directors were now free to use the classic forms to reflect the new realities.” (Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 70s, Charles Taylor)

In another forty years, what movie will people remember from 2019? I’m willing to bet that they will still talk about Joker and Parasite. I doubt they will still talk about 1917, Marriage Story or Little Women.

The same goes for the winners of the acting categories. Will people remember last year’s Best Actor winner, Rami Malek, as one of the greatest actors forty years from now? Hell NO. But they will remember Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Forty years ago, the Oscars awarded Best Actor to men like Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Jon Voight, and Dustin Hoffman — all actors whose monologues and techniques are still studied to this day.

Laura Dern’s performance in Marriage Story is certainly worth the nomination but if I had to predict, I’d put my money on Jennifer Lopez’s performance in Hustlers being the more iconic one in years to come. And Lopez wasn’t even nominated.

Brad Pitt is a great character actor. He was fun to watch in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. But let’s be real. The supporting performance of the year goes to Willem Dafoe for his portrayal as Thomas in Robert Eggers’ arthouse horror film, The Lighthouse. And he wasn’t even nominated either!

Many artists’ wins were hard-earned and about awarding their body of work. Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for several movies and has been acting since he was a young boy on the cast of Growing Pains in the 1980s. He didn’t win his Best Actor award until 2015 when he was the lead in The Revenant. Martin Scorcese, widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential directors in film history, made his first mark in the film industry in 1973 with Mean Streets, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he finally won Best Director for The Departed. Gary Oldman has been considered one of the greatest actors of his generation yet he’s only won one Best Actor award — in 2018. Ralph Fiennes has never won. Glenn Close has never won Best Actress. Peter O’Toole has never won, not even for Lawrence of Arabia.

Again, you get my point.

Because of this, I’m often not a fan of a first-timer winning Best Actor or Best Actress without a proven track record of great work. Too often, they go on to be nothing more than one-hit wonders.

The fact that the Academy has frequently awarded one hit wonders that have no lasting impact is what makes people think of the awards as culturally irrelevant.

Why are there so few modern classics?

It has to do with the current juvenile state of American movies. The infantilization of American movies began in 1977 with the never-before-seen success of Star Wars. (I say this as a Star Wars fan — I even have an X-wing tattoo on my left hip.) “Since 1977, that infantilization has become total. Mainstream moviemaking now caters almost exclusively to the tastes of teenage boys. As they currently stand, mainstream Hollywood releases consist almost exclusively of special effects-driven superhero blockbusters, sequels, and remakes, many of them just excuses to sell fast food Happy Meals, video games, toys, and other merchandise. Movies have devolved into spectacle and gimmicks. Disposability is the goal, the constant determination to make the audience hungry for a newer product.” (Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 70s, Charles Taylor)

If you’ve ever watched an Avengers or a Transformers movie, you know this is true. The narratives are nonsensical. What really counts is the amount of explosions, crashes and constant displays of computer-generated imagery. Each shot is no more than two or three seconds, which destroys any kinds of suspense or emotional response.

We are no longer watching movies. We are not even watching movie stars. We are watching brands.

Nowadays, if movies are expected to attract an adult audience, they are confined to the fall and winter season (also known as Awards Season). And since those kinds of movies won’t turn the kind of profit that Hollywood wants, the impulse to finance and get them made is low.

Why is everyone so mad about Joker STILL?

Like it or not, Joker is the most culturally significant movie of the entire year. The fact that it’s remained in the discourse for this long while so many other films have come and gone is important: it resonated with an enormous portion of the population. Young, old, men, women, American, international, leftist, right-leaning. It’s a game-changer. It’s a billion dollar-grossing blockbuster that also managed to win the top prize at Cannes Film Festival. Protesters around the world took to Joker’s anti-capitalist, anti-rich message. It was feared that the movie would inspire lone shooters, but so far, Joker has proved more inspiring to mass protest movements across the world. Anti-government protesters in Beirut, Lebanon, Santiago, Chile, Catalonia and Hong Kong have been spotted amidst crowds sporting Joker face paint and masks.

What makes people, especially liberals and feminists, so angry about the movie Joker?

Joker exposes liberal hypocrisy. It embodies a representation of the failures of neoliberal capitalism, and its disastrous consequences. So of course liberals hate it.

Joker is going through what the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri went through back in 2017 when it was nominated for Best Picture (I wrote about it here). Both movies ask the audience: What are we supposed to do with disenfranchised, vulnerable white men? Liberals hate Joker for the same reason they hated Three Billboards. We are humanizing a terrible white man and asking the audience to consider sympathizing with him and allowing him a voice rather than just shutting him out and pushing him towards far right extremists. The fact that they seem genuinely disappointed that Joker didn’t incite any mass shootings just makes it clear what their intentions really are. They deliberately misinterpreted the movie and refused to acknowledge its real message — that capitalism and the one percent are our real enemy.

#OscarsSoWhite is pointless.

Some people are going to take major offense but I’m willing to take my chances because I think it’s important for this to be said. This goes for all people of color (POCs) but since I’m Asian, I’ll emphasize my own community: Waiting on Hollywood to validate you isn’t going to help you out at all. The media representation activists are just as useless in their efforts as the corporate diversity industry in their goals for more “diversity” and “inclusion.” Let me be clear — inclusion is just another word for “colorblindness.” From who or what are they demanding “inclusion” anyway? Demanding inclusion is nothing more than a demand for white acceptance, which just further enforces white supremacy.

Here is how voting in the Academy works: There are coalitions behind the scenes that form voting blocs. There is no solidarity among the marginalized groups either. So who makes up the majority in the Academy? White voters. If marginalized Academy voters cannot get it together and form some sort of solidarity as a voting bloc, then yes, the Oscar nominees will stay very white and very male. Is that a problem? Well, only if you consider media representation to be the last bastion of liberation. (I should add that it’s pretty pitiful if you do.)

“Media representation is the siren song of neoliberal capitalism. Media representation is just a band aid and won't fix the actual cause of our alienation. All it does is make us more willing to accept our alienation if the millionaires we see on screen have Asian faces. Go create your own stories and your own platforms. Or just learn to read subtitles, as director Bong Joon Ho said. Stop glorifying the image of material status and start working towards actual self-determination in our communities.” (WJ Fong, Guy Debord and the Limits of Asian American Media Representation, Plan A Magazine)

Your life and self-worth will not change as a result of Asian and other non-white actors being cast as superheroes and romantic leads.

For people of color, especially Asian Americans, representation shouldn't just be about Hollywood, television, or pop music. It starts way earlier and much closer to home. It starts before your kids even begin kindergarten. This is why I firmly believe that representation cannot begin at the Hollywood level. It needs to happen in your own household. Don't just sit back and wait for Hollywood to start featuring more Asian actors. You are the entire world for much of your children's impressionable years. Make them count. Use those years to instill in them pride for their heritage and to celebrate their differences, not to ignore or neutralize them. 

In other words, don't be a corny boba liberal.

As I said at the opening of this article and in a previous blog post, 2019 marks one of the richest years in film history since 1999 and the 1970s. Maybe it’s because now that the culture has fallen so far down, there is no where to go but back up. Or maybe I’m just being a naive optimist who still believes in the magic of the movies. Hopefully the former.

Here are my predictions for the Oscars, which airs on Sunday, February 9th on ABC. I’ll be watching the show in Los Angeles with my best friend, fellow writer/podcaster Jess Rhee!

Best Picture

1917

Who should win: Parasite

Best Director

Sam Mendes, 1917

Who should win: Bong Joon Ho, Parasite

Best Actor

Joaquin Phoenix, Joker

Best Actress

Renee Zellweger, Judy

Best Supporting Actress

Laura Dern, Marriage Story

Who should win: Jennifer Lopez for Hustlers, but she wasn’t even nominated.

Best Supporting Actor

Brad Pitt, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Who should win: Willem Dafoe for The Lighthouse, but he wasn’t even nominated.

Best Animated Feature

Toy Story 4

Who should win: I Lost My Body

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