After the Oscar nominations came out featuring many male nominees and very little diversity, the Academy was hit with much criticism.
Just about everyone had an opinion, including horror author Stephen King. The day after the nominations were announced, King tweeted that he is eligible to vote in three categories: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay.
He also tweeted, “For me, the diversity issue — as it applies to individual actors and directors, anyway — did not come up. That said, I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”
That response was met with its own critique. Writer Roxane Gay tweeted back, “As a fan, this is painful to read from you, It implies that diversity and quality cannot be synonymous. They are not separate things. Quality is everywhere but most industries only believe in quality from one demographic. And now, here you are.”
Director Ava DuVernay also responded: “When you wake up, meditate, stretch, reach for your phone to check on the world and see a tweet from someone you admire that is so backward and ignorant you want to go back to bed.”
King then followed up, writing, “The most important thing we can do as artists and creative people is make sure everyone has the same fair shot, regardless of sex, colour, or orientation. Right now such people are badly underrepresented, and not only in the arts. You can’t win awards if you’re shut out of the game.”
King has further elaborated on his opinion in an op-ed for The Washington Post, published Tuesday and titled, “The Oscars are still rigged in favour of white people.”
In the piece, he doubles down on his opinion that the Academy should judge film while blind to race or gender, but that the current state of the world doesn’t make that possible.
King writes, “Those judging creative excellence should be blind to questions of race, gender or sexual orientation. I did not say that was the case today, because nothing could be further from the truth. Nor did I say that films, novels, plays and music focusing on diversity and/or inequality cannot be works of creative genius. They can be, and often are.”
He goes on to cite DuVernay’s recent Netflix miniseries When They See Us as an example of this and questions whether, while the Academy is drowning in “man-fiction” (ex. The Irishman, Ford v Ferrari, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ), many voting members made an effort to watch Harriet or The Last Black Man in Hollywood.
While acknowledging that his perspective is “white, male, old and rich,” King continues, “As with justice, judgments of creative excellence should be blind. But that would be the case in a perfect world, one where the game isn’t rigged in favour of the white folks.”
He continued, “Judging anyone’s work by any other standard is insulting and – worse – it undermines those hard-won moments when excellence from a diverse source is rewarded (against, it seems, all the odds) by leaving such recognition vulnerable to being dismissed as politically correct.” King concluded, “We don’t live in that perfect world, and this year’s less-than-diverse Academy Awards nominations once more prove it. Maybe someday we will. I can dream, can’t I? After all, I make stuff up for a living.”
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
