This year’s Oscar nominations have been criticised for being overwhelmingly pale, male and stale, once again upholding the Hollywood status quo. Yet both the talent and the commercial successes from actors of colour and female directors were on the big screens, from Hustlers to Us, from The Farewell to Dolemite Is My Name in a way that should have gotten Oscar voters to notice.
The lack of inclusivity in the nominees did not stop The Academy’s social media team from using black women happy reaction gifs as part of its nomination countdown, a typical example of representation done wrong.
Shortly after the nominees announcement, entertainment writer Courtney Enlow pointed out on Twitter that The Academy featured “more Black women (two, Naomie Harris and Regina King) in their tweets than their nominations” (one, Cynthia Erivo for acting in Harriet as well as for writing an original song, making her only the second black woman to receive multiple nominations in the same year 👏).
In total, in the hours before the nominations were revealed, The Academy tweeted three white men (including an animated film one) and three actresses gifs, two black women and one white woman.
The disconnect between the nominees and the reaction gifs used reminded me of Lauren Michele Jackson 2017 Teen Vogue op-ed “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs” (select quote but the full piece deserves reading):
“But even a casual observer of GIFing would notice that, as with much of online culture, black people appear at the center of it all. Or images of black people, at least.[...]
while reaction GIFs can and do every feeling under the sun, white and nonblack users seem to especially prefer GIFs with black people when it comes to emitting their most exaggerated emotions. [...]
Digital blackface does not describe intent, but an act — the act of inhabiting a black persona. Employing digital technology to co-opt a perceived cache or black cool, too, involves playacting blackness in a minstrel-like tradition. [...]
Ultimately, black people and black images are thus relied upon to perform a huge amount of emotional labor online on behalf of nonblack users. We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your “yaas” moments.[..]”
Here Harris and King happy gifs weren’t just performing delight and excitement — they acted as a way for The Academy to preempt criticism of lack of diversity, inclusion, and representation. A few years ago, the Oscars had to reckon with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, launched by April Reign to highlight the disconnect between the nominees and the American population.
When The Academy’s social media team prepared its pre-nominations content (I am guessing without knowledge of who would be actually nominated), they were likely conscious that only featuring white male gifs would provoke a backlash. Yet their gif choice is a tiny effort, significantly diminished by the lack of representation in the male gifs.
But when it comes to the Oscars, the social accounts are a tiny part of the representation needed. What really matters is that actors of all ethnicities, genders, ages and disabilities get an equal chance at being nominated and winning based on their performance rather than the prejudices of what the voting body believes a good actor or director looks like, and what stories are worthy.
Ultimately, The Academy’s choice of gifs was cosmetic. It suggests some awareness of the need for representation, at least from the management side, that neither permeates with the voters nor does it go as far as making the voting system truly equal.