#OscarsSoAmerican

Photo: Newswhip

The Oscar awards are a global entertainment staple, rewarding many great actors and film practitioners over the years. A number of Nigerians were just elected into its voting board. What does this development portend for us as Nigerians and for our movie industry?

The idea for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started out as an organization to facilitate smoother working relationships within the American movie industry in the 20s. Curiously, it was to be known as the International Academy but that prefix was dropped by the time the academy was officially incorporated. 

In more recent times the awards have been dogged by allegations of being too ‘white’, a fact which the academy itself acknowledged and thereafter pledged an era of greater inclusivity by rendering its voting pool more diverse across not just race but also gender, age and relevance. And so consequently, a number of our own veterans here got drafted into the voting academy, but I’ll get back to that in a bit.

A couple of years back, the Oscars so white hash tag trended, I remember Will Smith protesting by famously boycotting the awards. Whether or not he deserved a nod that year is arguable, his portrayal of Nigerian forensic pathologist, Dr. Omalu was not his best. The point though is that American actors of colour for years have felt their efforts weren’t adequately valued by the academy, this came to a head a couple of years ago with the Oscars so white campaign.

This tweet from April Reign summarises the agitation - ‘Until we are no longer lauding “firsts” after a 90 year history, until we can no longer count a traditionally underrepresented community's number of nominations in a particular category on our fingers, #OscarsSoWhite remains relevant. The fight continues.’

So now that our very own finest are in the mix, a school of thought believes that as Nigerians, this is our inroad into the Oscars. While our movie industry continues to evolve, I do not believe this is a healthy aspiration for us. We should continue to aspire to make the best movies in the world but the academy shouldn’t be the yardstick by which we measure progress. As Africans, seeking validation by way of foreign standard bearers is never that simple.

We need to continue to develop our own academies and reward systems for our own art. In fact, our reward systems should evolve in tandem with our industry. The academy folks have enough on their own plate already. In essentially a century of its existence, the academy has not been able to equitably reward talent coming out of just one country, let alone the world.

The academy isn’t quite the kind of global enterprise like say the Nobel Prize for instance, which actually expresses a truly global outlook in delivering its mandate. How many times has the awards, particularly the most coveted categories gone outside the US? The one that comes to my mind was some Italian guy that was jumping all over the tables at the awards after winning Best Actor. Just like there are undoubtedly many saints in heaven that have not been canonized by the Catholic church (a fact also acknowledged by the church), the Oscars cannot claim to consistently reward the most outstanding works of art globally.  

What place do Hubert Ogunde classics Aiye and Jaiyesimi have in the history of the Oscars? In the same vein, the TV adaptation of ‘Things Fall Apart’ should have won or at least been nominated for an Emmy; the same logic applies to the music industry. The Oscars cannot and should not be an umpire of global movie artistry; to be fair to them I don’t think even they claim to be. The Oscars should not represent the highest ambition for art in our movie industry.