It’s every cinephile’s favorite time of year: Oscar season. Typically, I would consider myself a proud cinephile, but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t seen a good majority of the movies nominated — I'm sorry to all you Lady Gaga fans, but I still haven't seen "A Star is Born."
Nonetheless, there have been some historic choices for the Oscars involving a more diverse selection of nominees than past years; however, these nominations may still be a product of the Oscars being known as a whitewashed and Hollywood-centered ceremony.
Firstly, I want to give a big huzzah to Netflix for being the first streaming service to ever have a movie nominated for Best Picture. Netflix’s “Roma” received nine additional nominations, including Best Actress for Yalitza Aparicio who is the second Mexican woman to be nominated for this award.
The fact that a streaming service like Netflix has achieved this feat is amazing. I remember when Netflix was just an inconvenient Blockbuster. Remember when Blockbusters were a thing? What if Blockbuster decided to produce a movie then it was nominated for an Oscar? No one would take it seriously, and yet here’s Netflix waltzing on in. But I digress.
In addition, “Black Panther” was nominated for Best Picture and “Avengers: Infinity Wars” was nominated for Best Visual Effects. These are Marvel’s first Oscar nominations, which is shocking to few.
Marvel cranks out at least two, maybe three, movies every year now and they’re all just OK. Even when the first few Marvel movies came out like “Iron Man” and “Captain America,” I never expected anything to come from them except a passionate fan base, certainly not major movie awards.
I’m not going to lie, I didn’t really love “Black Panther” that much; it was just kind of a blah story. The soundtrack was good though, I will give you T’Challa fans that.
A column published by CNN argued how “Black Panther” and “BlacKkKlansman” were just two movies that, while possibly worthy in the Academy’s eyes, might have been nominated in response to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
In 2016, several celebrities boycotted the Oscars by not attending, saying how there was a lack of diversity in the nominations. “BlacKkKlansman” director Spike Lee boycotted that year's Oscars and even accredited this year’s nomination for Best Director as a result of the movement.
While no one from the Academy is going to speak up and say, “Yeah, we were being racist,” it’s still nice to see more diversity coming from what is typically a very whitewashed event. And you can still expect me to tune in to this year’s show.
The Oscars will premiere at 8 p.m. on Feb. 24 on ABC.
