Ranting On...the Selma Snubs

Like clockwork, every year after the Oscar nominations are announced, certain things happen.  The press suddenly wants to declare who was unexpected (even though it's actually pretty rare for an out-of-nowhere nominee or miss-though The Lego Movie was admittedly an example), and more to the point, accusations against the Academy start to fly.  I have hit Oscar boards for years, and literally every single year people declare "I'm done with the Oscars" and "Best/Worst Lineup Ever" who will be saying the exact same thing the following year.  The reality is that you can't please everybody (even if you create your own awards, you end up re-thinking certain things a few months later), and each year there's going to be something someone hates and something someone loves (hence why I do the OVP-so I can keep things in order, at least for myself).  However, this year a lot of the vitriol toward the Academy was specifically around Selma, and the exclusions of director Ava DuVernay and lead actor David Oyelowo, including charges of racism and sexism against the Academy, and since this was slightly louder and more pointed than usual, it was something I wanted to address with our Friday rant.

I will preface this article by saying that I'm not going to discuss the qualitative reasons that Selma should have been included in more categories for two reasons.  One, starting an argument like this because a film is perceived as better than another film is juvenile, pointless, and completely objective.  You might think Whiplash is a brilliant treatise on the pursuit of perfection, and I might think it's a self-indulgent, misogynistic look at how society values the sacrifices made by straight white men far more than those made by anyone else.  It's the same movie, and both perspectives hold water (hence why that film was so hard to review).  The point is that you would have voted for the film, I wouldn't have, and that's how an awards show, just like a democracy, works.

The second reason, and the primary reason that I'm writing this article, is that I haven't seen Selma.  This is not for a lack of wanting to-it looks like a great movie, and I'll be checking it out sometime this weekend.  The problem for me is that this film, despite being nominated for Best Picture in 2014, has not been available to the vast majority of the country for more than a week, as it premiered wide last Friday.  Knowing the arcane rules of the Academy like I do, I know that you just need to have played in a first-run LA theater for a week in order to qualify for a nomination, which is why Selma did nab the two nominations that it did despite being available to most of the country in 2015, not 2014.

I know that with this being the most prominent African-American-themed movie of the year, and in particular with this being a potentially historical moment for African-American women (had she been nominated, Ava DuVernay would have been the first black woman to be nominated for Best Director), that it's easy to see racist tones to the snubbing in favor of films with almost exclusively white casts like Foxcatcher and The Imitation Game, but you have to look at the larger situation before you judge too harshly, and the reality is that Selma ran a poor campaign for the Oscar.  Yes, people should be nominated on their own merits, and the best movies should be cited in theory (and occasionally a tiny film chugs through like The Tale of Princess Kaguya did this year with Animated Feature), but when you're talking about a multi-million dollar campaign, and you make a series of very high-profile mistakes, it's no wonder that things turned out poorly.

For starters, Paramount thought that the Oscars were the only place that mattered, and skipped sending screeners to the SAG Awards, the Critics Choice Awards, and a number of other major critical and guild organizations around the country in order for them to see the films before they voted.  As a result, Selma missed at most of these places while other films like The Imitation Game and Foxcatcher racked up big points.  This wasn't those critical organizations' fault-Selma simply wasn't available to them.  It wasn't in a screener, it wasn't in a theater, and it wasn't already on DVD.  There was simply no way to watch it.  AMPAS did receive screeners, as has been noted by many, but you can't just count on the Oscars to make buzz.  It's like only focusing on the general election when you have a primary challenger-you need to have started to build for your film if you want to be a major player at the Oscars.  Yes, you can make it to the Oscars with little or no buzz (again, Princess Kaguya), but it's rare, and certainly not if you want to be making a push for a major awards haul.  Selma misjudged badly how much voters rely on buzz and other industry awards to decide what to prioritize in their viewing.

Secondly, Selma didn't release nationally to create a movement.  There's a reason that films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Birdman and Boyhood did well this year, and it wasn't just quality-it was that the American populace, and not just the hoi polloi of New York and Los Angeles society, had actually had the chance to see the movies.  In a world of Twitter and Buzzfeed, people desperately want to interact with a movie the moment it comes out, and only letting a subset of the populace see the film makes it much more difficult to advance buzz.  Selma isn't the only victim of such a realization this year-films like A Most Violent Year and Cake both had much higher hopes for a nomination, but were too difficult to view, and in my opinion this is a horrible trend.  Movie studios and theater managers have to start realizing that in a hyper-globalized economy, you can't sell your product in one part of the country and not the rest of the country, as people will either A) resort to methods to see the product anyway, in suspect but (let's be honest here) ridiculously easy ways or B) have less appetite to catch your film in theaters when it comes post-peak to their town, potentially skipping the film until Netflix has it.  You can't misuse your customers too long before they start being turned off by your business practices, and this year Selma got the full-brunt of that blow.

I will say, before I exit this rant, that part of me wants to share in this outrage against the Academy.  There are ways to call the Academy (and the awards season) sexist with films that did their due diligence like Wild, a splendid movie that I believe, had it had a male lead, would have landed a spot in the Best Picture race (just compare it to Jean-Marc Vallee's last film Dallas Buyers Club and what is missing with their comparative Oscar hauls).  Films about women and minorities, films made by women and minorities, and particularly films made by women and minorities about women and minorities have long been ignored by the Academy and the critical establishment.  It's worth noting, for example, that in the history of the Academy only a paltry four women have been nominated for Best Director, and all but one of those women (Jane Campion) was directing a film with a male lead.  Selma is the eighth Best Picture directed by a woman to not receive a corresponding Best Director nomination, and only one film directed by a woman has ever won Best Picture.  The same sorts of stats spring to mind with films by persons of color or by GLBT filmmakers.  This is indeed a problem, but it's hard to feel too much sympathy for Paramount in particular because they took such unnecessary risks with their film.  Had they opened Selma three weeks earlier and spent the small amount (certainly for a major studio) to get more screeners out to smaller guild and industry groups, it's very likely we'd be seeing history this week.  As it is, it's more about a distribution system that is broken, not necessarily by racism but by bad business practices, that caused yesterday's Selma snubs.