Not in word, but in deed: Why equal rights in cinema is beneficial
Dmitry Kurkin
Almost two years have passed since the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag scandal and all the time the word "inclusiveness" flashes with a red light every time there is even a hint of discrimination on the basis of gender, race or sex.
A satirical horror about an African American who landed in “white liberal hell” collected $ 250 million in world hire and was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Since then, the American Film Academy, as promised, has made concessions and has made its composition more diverse. However, the recent criticism of the cover of the Los Angeles Times with the proud removal of “Focus has shifted” and six actresses, of whom all six were white, showed that the focus has not shifted completely, and the professional community is not ready to take inclusiveness in parts - only in its entirety.
And indeed, a shift cannot happen at once. And the problem is not so much in the jury of film awards and the diversity of nominees: they stand at the farthest end of the workshop conveyor and reflect the state of affairs in the industry. Responding to critics, Jessica Chastain, one of the heroines of the ill-starred cover of the LA Times, points out that she will not even remember five women of color, who in the outgoing year were given prominent leading roles. It sounds like an excuse, but there is a reasonable grain in it. If female directors are not even close to large projects, and actors with Middle Eastern roots are still being offered exclusively to play terrorists, it’s pointless to expect them to magically be among Oscar nominees.
2017 is not that the statistics of diversity are corrected much (it remains equally deplorable both in large commercial cinema and in independent). But he gave some excellent examples of how inclusiveness can work, and confirmed that real inclusiveness does not appear in artificial quotas for minorities or incubators of positive discrimination. Those can become a temporary patch, a way to eliminate the source of tension, but they do not help to solve the problem of impartiality at a distance. What is really worth talking about is the creation of an atmosphere of trust in authors and artisans, regardless of their origin.
When last year Jordan Peel started shooting the film “Off,” he didn’t have a single full meter, and there were less than a dozen acting works, except for comedy sketches. Nevertheless, producer Jason Bloom, who stamps mediocre horror films to the max, considered that the project conceived by Peel has the right to life. As a result, a satirical horror about an African American who fell into “white liberal hell” collected $ 250 million in world hire and was nominated for a Golden Globe - moreover as a comedy (the director responded accordingly, stating that in fact “Off” was a documentary film).
Break the system - and the "whiteness of the Oscars" is precisely that the result of systematic ignoring - help precedents
Wonder Woman, the first superhero blockbuster filmed by female director Patti Jenkins, performed even better. It is hard to believe, but it was almost twenty years from Hollywood to make the obvious decision and entrust the woman’s story (as it was designed by William Marston) to the woman. The final result met the expectations of far from all viewers, but the rolling 800 million speak for themselves: such a box-office film, shot by a woman, never simply collected.
The emphasis on the numbers of box offices here is not accidental. Ultimately, discrimination in the film industry is generated not so much by institutional racism or misogyny (although they, too, have not gone away), as is the banal fear of not getting money at the box office. Inviting the main role in the film “The Great Wall of China” not to an Asian actor, but to Matt Damon, the producers seem to insure against failure: the people will definitely go to Damon. In fact, this approach does not provide any guarantee (another proof of which is the rating of the most overvalued actors published at the end of the year - in fact, those who brought not too much to the studios). But to convince people leading projects with multi-million dollar budgets that the viewer is not at all against new faces on the screen — and new authors on the other side of the camera — this does not help much.
Break the system - and the “whiteness of the Oscars” is precisely that the result of systematic ignoring - help precedents. And “Off”, and “Wonder Woman”, and “Love is a Disease”, a touching melodrama about interethnic relations, filmed by Qumeil Nanjiani on the basis of his own biography, just such precedents create: all these stories are called, first-person, the faces of those very social groups that the former Hollywood variety has chronically avoided.
And on the approach is already the "Breaking Time", the first Disney project, at the helm of which stood the director of "Selma" Ava Duverny. And Black Panther, Marvelov's blockbuster on an African superhero, shot by African American Ryan Coogler. And, apparently, the Disney gaming "Aladdin", for the main roles in which the actors of Middle Eastern origin are persistently looking for. In the series - from “The White Crow” and “Atlanta” to “The Master is not all trades” - the process goes even faster, but the big movie gradually begins to catch up with the train.
Positive examples, in principle, work better than negative ones. And if the new inclusiveness is based on them, the selection of awards will not have to be pulled by the nominees' ears only in order not to anger the activists for equality, and Jessica Chastain will not have to look for potential heroines for the covers.
Photo:Universal pictures