We need more minority made films to be appreciated and recognized by the Academy.
The 2022 Oscar Nominations are in and we have a lot to talk about. With some movies dominating multiple categories and some underappreciated, here’s your guide to the 2022 Oscar Nominations.
The nominations for Best Picture include: Belfast, Coda, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story. All of these films did extremely well at the box office this year and earned great critical acclaim, even being nominated for several other categories at the Oscars (Belfast [6], Coda [3], Don’t Look Up [4], Drive My Car [4], Dune [10], King Richard [5], Licorice Pizza [3], Nightmare Alley [4], The Power of the Dog [11], and West Side Story [7]). However, the Oscars have been called out in the past for the exclusion of minority roles and films in their awards ceremony and this year is no different.
For the Best Director category, all nominees have worked on one of the Best Picture nominated films. Three out of the five nominees in this category are white men (Kenneth Branagh nominated for his work on Belfast, Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza, and Steven Spielberg, for West Side Story). Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, nominated for Drive My Car, is the only non-white nominee and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog is the only woman nominated.
Across the Best Actress/Actor categories, there are only 6 nominees of color (Penelope Cruz, Ariana DeBose, Aunjanue Ellis, Javier Bardem, Will Smith, and Denzel Washintgton) out of the total 20 nominees. In the Best Adapted Screenplay category, there are three women (Siân Heder, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jane Campion) and two people of color (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe) nominated with solely white men being nominated for the rest of the category and the original screenplay category. Lastly, in the category for Best Cinematographer, only one woman, Ari Wegener, is nominated.
The number of minority nominees is staggeringly low considering how many movies are made by these groups. For example, in 2021 there were 382 films directed by women, and yet 1 movie directed by a woman made the cut for the Oscars (Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog). There are barely any sources that state an accurate number of how many films were made, directed, and written by people of color, but the number of Oscar nominations is far lower than that of white nominees. Not to mention the number of queer made, disability made, and foreign made films that never get counted.
The bottom line is that the Oscars have consistently and will continue to misrepresent the number of minority made films and will continue to nominate the same groups of movies for every category. Some of the ways to combat the lack of diverse movie choices made by the Academy, is to research and view these minority made films and to keep these films in circulation. Minority made films need to be encouraged in the same way that white made films are.