Thoughts on Andrea Riseborough's Oscar Nomination

With Oscar, there's always a controversy.  This is not new-it happens literally every year.  This year, it appears, the controversy is swirling around the nomination of Andrea Riseborough for To Leslie, one of the biggest upsets in the past twenty years of Oscar nominations.  Riseborough, for those who don't know, essentially came out of nowhere to land this nomination-a staggering situation where she had very little precursor support and her film was not seen very much, and she got in through sheer grassroots pluck.  How coordinated it was is up for debate (it appears, based on using similar descriptions in a number of Twitter posts, that Riseborough, who funded at least part of the campaign, had some coordination with Academy members).  But what did happen was that a number of very famous members of the Academy (including a lot of Oscar-nominated/winning actresses like Amy Adams, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, & Mira Sorvino) publicly supported Riseborough, trying to get people to vote for her and to see her movie.  The plan worked.  Riseborough became an Oscar nominee on Tuesday morning, getting in for a film that even the most devoted of film fans might not have heard of a few weeks ago.  And she did so on top of some much bigger names/movies, specifically Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, & Margot Robbie, who were expected to take that slot.

The nomination has elicited a lot of passion both for what it supposedly meant and for whom it ended up cutting from the conversation, namely Davis & Deadwyler, both African-American actresses who were expected to be nominated in a field that now does not include a single Black nominee.  Some have accused the Academy of racism, that they passed over two Black women who were expected to be nominated in favor of a white actress who got in based on her famous friends, predominantly well-known white women.  Others have stated that they think what Riseborough did was inappropriate, that it might have even violated Academy rules.  I want to try to parcel through this, and I will say before starting this article that I do understand that there is conflicting feeling here, including from myself, on exactly how to find the best explanation for this situation.

The first thing, and the thing that I feel most ardently about, is that Riseborough didn't violate Academy rules here, unless something comes up that isn't already public.  If these Academy members did this of their own accord, either for a performer that they like or for a costar/friend that they wanted to promote...I honestly don't see a difference between that and someone like Jamie Lee Curtis getting in after heavily promoting how much she wanted an Oscar nod all season.  Riseborough's campaign tactics were creative, but I genuinely don't see a difference between this and what actresses like Cate Blanchett & Michlle Yeoh did, showing up at cocktail parties & receptions all season.  Riseborough didn't have a budget, so she got scrappy, but I don't think that this violated any Academy rules, and to suggest she should lose this nomination feels really gross to me.  

In the past, I've talked about this, but the Academy owns whom their branches vote for-that's how it works.  Bruce Broughton, probably the most famous recent example of someone who lost a nomination for campaigning illegally, sent out emails on behalf of his film Alone Yet Not Alone (which got him a nomination for Best Original Song), but it's hard to imagine him losing his nomination had he done the same & gotten in for a film like Frozen, and he was right-there's a double standard for what major studio films can get away with versus less-finessed campaigns for films like To Leslie and Alone Yet Not Alone.  It also has to be said-I sincerely doubt anyone involved actually thought Riseborough would get nominated.  This sort of last minute campaign happens a lot, usually on a smaller scale, and it never actually pans out (look at last year when there was a last-minute push to get Penelope Cruz Best Actress...that didn't win it for her).  I'm guessing Riseborough saw an opportunity to do what Ann Dowd did a few years ago-use Oscar buzz for a small film to get in front of more casting directors.  After all, even though Dowd didn't get a nomination, she did end up landing series regular roles on The Leftovers and The Handmaid's Tale...the money she sank into that campaign changed her career for the better.  This was a one-time thing, and almost certainly would never work again (though it will be tried for the rest of time).

All of this is to say that Riseborough's nomination feels legitimate to me, and needs to stand as is.  But the second half of this equation, that Davis & Deadwyler didn't get nominated, is a much grayer area to discuss.  I think we should start with some facts.  First, the Academy, like most major American institutions including Hollywood, does have issues with racism, and has a racist history of under-nominating people-of-color, particularly Black women, in acting contests (as well as other categories, especially directing).  This is driven in part by the lack of major roles for Black women in Hollywood.  While there has been some improvement on this front in recent years, it says something that Deadwyler & Davis were the only major Black actresses really in contention here, while you have a number of other high profile white actresses that missed (Margot Robbie, Olivia Colman, Jennifer Lawrence)...and there were still a number of white women nominated for Best Actress.  Even with more films in contention, if 1-2 Black actresses miss in a given year, it likely means that no Black actress will be nominated (that's not the case for white actors).

However, I also want to note two things here.  The first is, as someone who has watched the Oscar race for a while, it is very easy to explain why these two specific performances did not resonate with the Academy even after doing well in the precursors.  Deadwyler was the only nominee for her film-the movie did not have a chance in any other categories (it was just Deadwyler), and in recent years that type of nomination has been harder to land.  Just look at Best Supporting Actor, where Eddie Redmayne made it to virtually every precursor (he was Globe, SAG, & BAFTA cited), and still missed with Oscar.  These types of performances get nominations (not just Riseborough, but also Ana de Armas & Bill Nighy this year), but it's harder to get in, and Deadwyler (who was not famous prior to this year) was uniquely vulnerable to people simply not seeing her film.

Davis is also easy to explain.  The Woman King was a hit, but it was also an action film, which historically have struggled for acting nominations.  Someone like Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies couldn't get in despite similar precursor runs...Tom Cruise is in a much bigger hit movie that did get nominated for Best Picture this year, and he's not nominated.  The amount of times that a Black actress has had this happen, particularly in not winning the trophy, is enough that I'm not going to defend the Academy here as a collective, but I will also say that this makes sense to me based on the types of films that these women were cited for.  I did not predict Davis based on her being in an action film, and while I did predict Deadwyler, I did cite her as being vulnerable due to the film's otherwise tepid response.

The last thing I have to remind people is that there are five slots in a given acting field.  Five slots...and far more performances worthy of praise than those five slots allow.  People seem to forget this every year.  One of the things that bothers me, because I think it's done with the idea of making people upset, is how some Oscar pundits make a point of calling every miss a "snub" without pointing out that if you only get five, there is good work that is going to be left on the table (i.e. if you're expecting eight women to fill five slots, you're going to leave unhappy).  It always feels like clickbait that the first thing people focus on are the names that didn't make it, and not acknowledging that, if we just made the lists ourselves, people would be angry about that.  I look at my own Best Actress field, one that I've made, and I'm angry about the nominations that couldn't make it-and I made the list!  I don't think this means that we expand the fields to more nominations (I don't think watering down the list makes sense), but I do think having a moment where we acknowledge that not everyone will get a nomination every year is important.  That does not excuse the Academy's consistent lack of representation of women-of-color, which like I said above is a repetitive enough pattern that it should be called out, but it does mean that we need to have an honest conversation here.  The awards are not fair.  

And they never have been.  If you go back to the 1940's, certain types of stars (i.e. major actors who were signed to studio contracts) had a better shot at winning than freelance actors (this is part of why screen legend Barbara Stanwyck never won an Oscar).  No single voter watches the same set of movies, and even if they did, no person reacts the same way to a movie...that's part of the inventive magic of art, that each reaction to it is different than the previous person's.  It's hard to grasp how certain actors like Rita Hayworth, Edward G. Robinson, & Myrna Loy somehow were never good enough for Oscar (and it's worth noting that list includes actors-of-color like Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, & Nancy Kwan), but if they were nominated another group of performers likely wouldn't have been.  You could make the argument that Riseborough, as a white woman, got a form of privilege because she was able to coast on this type of nomination while other actors-of-color in similar situations where they were in small, critically-praised films (think Alfre Woodard for Clemency and Nicole Beharie in Miss Juneteenth) didn't get nominated, and you wouldn't be wrong...though it's worth remembering that Riseborough's nomination is so atypical you'd probably have to go back to Carol Kane in Hester Street to find a similar film that came totally out-of-nowhere to get cited (i.e. it's hard to draw precedent from a once-in-a-lifetime situation).

Like I said above, I don't have all the answers here, and I don't even have all of the opinions.  I think that there is something kind of cool about the way that an independent film manages to bypass all of the major corporations and the vaunted smoke room dealings that frequently dictate who is and isn't worthy of this type of recognition.  I don't love that in order for that to happen, two Black women were not nominated, continuing a longer pattern with the Oscars and Hollywood ignoring the achievements of women-of-color.  I think in general, trying to sum this into a tweet or a social media fight doesn't do anyone any good.  There are no easy answers when artistic subjectivity, unknowns about voting, & the unique tastes of a century-old institution are all competing to try to provide explanation.  Pretending that there is is the way of folly.