A win for Chadwick Boseman would be a triumph at the Oscars for Black artists

Protests against white, male-dominated lists of nominees had become deafening, and the Academy had no option but to recognise women and artists of colour. But it still has more to do, says Micha Frazer-Carroll

A burst of charisma: Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (David Lee/Netflix)

After facing six years of campaigning, scrutiny, and high-profile boycotts from directors and stars, the Oscars, it seems, may finally have turned things around. This Sunday, the Academy Awards – held up as a symbol of Hollywood’s problem with race after the viral #OscarsSoWhite controversy took off in 2015 – will proceed with the most diverse list of nominations since the awards began 92 years ago.

The shift spans both race and gender. Since the first Oscars ceremony, until this year, only five women had been nominated for Best Director – which in 2020 prompted Insecure’s Issa Rae to quip, after announcing the all-male list of nominees, “Congratulations to those men’’. But in 2021, two women are in the category. And in the acting categories, half of the nominees are people of colour – a striking turnaround from 2020’s awards, which saw only one nomination for an actor of colour, Cynthia Erivo.

There are some particularly exciting nominations in this year’s shortlist, leading many black critics to breathe a sigh of satisfaction and declare an exasperated “Finally!” at the news. Chadwick Boseman, whose death from cancer in 2020 came as a shock to fans, joined the likes of Heath Ledger and James Dean in the rare category of people posthumously nominated for one of their final roles. The part he is nominated for – virtuoso trumpet player Levee Green in jazz drama Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – saw the actor shine in his last performance, with vulnerable soliloquies and bursts of charisma.

Meanwhile, London-grown star Daniel Kaluuya, who broke onto the scene in the UK with roles in Skins and Black Mirror – and in the US with Jordan Peele’s Get Out – is predicted to take Best Supporting Actor this year, after losing out on Best Actor in 2018. This time, he is nominated for Black Panthers thriller Judas and the Black Messiah, in which he embodies the militancy and radicalism of activist Fred Hampton in a way that breaks through the screen and grabs you. Oddly enough, his competition includes Lakeith Stanfield, who was the top billing on the same picture; he matches up, too, against Leslie Odom Jr and Paul Raci, both of whom he beat on the way to winning the 2021 Bafta, plus fellow Brit Sacha Baron Cohen.

In terms of theme, Judas and the Black Messiah and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom aren’t anomalies; in fact, many of the stories nominated touch on issues of oppression and liberation, whether overtly or covertly. For Best Picture, there is Minari, a heart-wrenching and rich semi-autobiographical story following a Korean-American family after their move to Arkansas, and Sound of Metal, a film that brings Deaf culture to the mainstream. And in the documentary category, there’s Crip Camp, an exploration of a camp for disabled teenagers from which the US disability rights movement arose. OK, yes, there’s also Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, but overall, the Oscars look radically different this year compared to last.

None of this happened by magic. In reality, the pandemic likely played a large role. As critic Bob Mondello pointed out on NPR (a national US radio station and media organisation), 2020 Hollywood has been turned upside down, and choosing to open your movie in the middle of a pandemic is a huge financial risk that most Oscar hopefuls decided to forgo. That’s why many of the bigger-budget films – the new adaptation of musical West Side Story, costume epic The Last Duel and Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch – have all held off until next year, opening up opportunities for smaller-budget, less typically award-winning stories. 

That’s not to say the Academy isn’t also slowly changing. In September, after a summer of protests that saw institutions from Pepsi to Netflix panicking to announce new diversity initiatives, the Oscars published their own. Hot on the heels of Bafta’s new measures, the Academy said that it would be introducing a set of new eligibility requirements for the most illustrious category, Best Picture. These criteria don’t just address diversity on screen, but span diversity among film crews, studios, and opportunities for training and advancement on set. The requirements represent the biggest diversity move the Academy has made this century, but after the new rules gained mixed reviews from critics, we will have to wait until 2024 before we see the results. 

Shaka King directs Daniel Kaluuya on the set of Judas and the Black Messiah (Glen Wilson/Warner Bros)

Now is definitely not the time for the Oscars to rest on their laurels – the Academy is still 84 per cent white and 68 per cent male, and if you look at the outcomes of its pre-pandemic efforts, all previous roads to Oscars diversity are better described as cul-de-sacs. And though the make-up of the nomination lists has changed, we shouldn’t forget that it has taken six years of lobbying, a nosedive in viewership, a pandemic and a global anti-racist uprising to get the Oscars to the position they find themselves in this year. 

After years of debate about the Academy’s existential problems – the historical lack of diversity, the disproportionate sway it has at the box office, the demographic overlap between Academy members and filmmakers themselves, and of course the inherent pointlessness of a group of old white men voting on something as subjective as art – it seems like the pandemic, against all odds, has made the Oscars less elitist. Maybe it was the only possible spanner in the works that would show them that if they wanted to do it, it could be done.

I have to admit, I’m personally waiting for the day when we do away with the Academy altogether and start from scratch. But in the meantime, this year has given many of us some long-awaited vindication: the most esteemed awards ceremony has finally faced up to the fact that all-white shortlists aren’t a given.