Without a doubt, the 2017 Oscars will be one to remember, if only for the cringeworthy mistake in which caused La La Land to be announced as the winner of Best Picture, when in actuality the Academy-picked winner was Moonlight. Though, at the same time, we did have some great triumphs for the night. Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim to win an Oscar and Viola Davis became the first black actress to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony.
As a result of these wins, there seems to be some confusion. The Oscars are still overwhelmingly white and prejudiciously so, just as they were before, and the wins for Ali, Davis, Moonlight and Fences, don't erase this fact. Why not?
Well, let's look at the facts. This year there were tons of black nominees in the running, but very few of them actually won compared to white winners, even next to some frankly awful picks. For example, Hidden Figures, a critically acclaimed movie about African American women in STEM fields, won zero Oscars despite having a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. By comparison, Suicide Squad, won its category with only 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.
What I'm getting at is that white people like me can get away with a terrible job and be rewarded for it anyway. Meanwhile, people of color can be near perfect and get none of the recognition. This was no more apparent than it was through the endless wins for La La Land, a movie about a white person trying to save true jazz, an art style that was created and pioneered by black people. That alone is problematic, but it was downright infuriating to see its cast and crew praise a new era of diversity in film-making when there's only one major non-white character in a movie about a black art style. To add insult to injury, that character, played by John Legend, is considered to be a "sell-out" while Ryan Gosling's lily white character is the last true jazz artist.
Even after the Best Picture mix-up was rectified, Moonlight, which has been heralded as being one of the only major motion pictures to focus on black gay masculinity, has been forced to share the headline with La La Land, because of someone else's mistake. Its success, every step of the way, has been overshadowed by someone else's failure, it's cast hasn't been allowed to properly celebrate its own merits. When the mistake was revealed, Jimmy Kimmel ran onstage to say that La La Land deserved an award too--couldn't we all just have an award? No, no, we can't. This isn't an end of Mean Girls moment, because the award was never theirs to keep. It was always Moonlight's and Moonlight's alone.
And while we're at it, screw Kimmel's jokes about non-European sounding names being hard to pronounce, too. Screw all the montages of Oscar winners past reading mean tweets with only Samuel L. Jackson as the token non-white person. Even your jokes are white, and yet somehow all your punchlines aren't.
