Echoing the shade throwing vibes of Natalie Portman’s “And the all male nominees are…” at the diet misandrist Golden Globes back in January, Emma Stone saw fit to capitalize on the ever-increasing chicness of politicism pertaining to the hating on white men trend with her own little dig before introducing the nominees for the Best Director category at the Oscars last night.
But rather than thinking a touch more carefully about her word usage, Stone blurted out, “These four men and Greta Gerwig created their own masterpieces last year.” In contrast to Portman’s wording, Stone very blatantly discounted the fact that Jordan Peele is black and Guillermo del Toro is Mexican, and specifically alluded to this in his speech with the urge for anyone who has broken into the industry from the literal and metaphorical outside to keep pushing. As he stated, “I am an immigrant like Alfonso [Cuarón] and Alejandro [González Iñárritu], my compadres. Like Gael [García Bernal], like Salma [Hayek] and like many, many of you. In the last twenty-five years I’ve been living in a country all of our own. Part of it is here, part of it is in Europe, part of it is everywhere. Because I think that the greatest thing our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
Apparently, Stone, herself directed by the aforementioned González Iñárritu in Black Swan with a male protagonist a.k.a. Birdman (which gave far more credibility to her acting career than La La Land has), doesn’t seem to think that being a longstanding minority in the film industry matters at all so long as you have a penis (cut them off–cut them all off!). What Stone was also missing on her side with this jab is that at least there was one woman nominated in the category at the Academy Awards. When Portman presented, it truly was a sea of sausage, mostly the white meat kind consisting of Martin McDonagh, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg and, of course, the lone dark meat of the bunch, Del Toro.
So for Stone to flippantly discount not just the very momentous presence of Gerwig as a result of her being “the only female,” as well as Peele, who had already made history earlier in the evening with his win in the category of Best Original Screenplay, is extreme in its oversimplification. Because, yes, Peele was the first “person of color” to snag an award in this department (practically nullifying the fact that he ever did something as, to the likes of the Academy, so low-brow as Keanu).
But no, Stone wanted her attention grab in some way–after all, she didn’t get any recognition for last year’s performance in Battle of the Sexes the way she at least did at the Golden Globes by being thrown a nomination. And that smug look on her face while doing it (more self-important than impish, the way Portman’s was) only makes a viewer want to smack it off her visage all the more, for this is the same person who shamelessly played a “quarter-Chinese,” “quarter-Hawaiian character,” Allison Ng, in Cameron Crowe’s 2015 disaster, Aloha. Should she really be the one to point fingers about Hollywood’s diversity problem when she didn’t seem to mind as she was taking a multimillion dollar check for that role? Or serving as a brief and not as effective muse as Scarlett Johansson to Woody Allen in Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man? Or playing the cliched part of white savior in The Help? It’s almost as hypocritical as Meryl Streep giving a standing ovation to known molester and rapist Roman Polanski when he won Best Director for The Pianist, petitioning for his release from arrest in Switzerland and then turning around to give grand speeches about “the great shake-up” happening in the industry.
These women, the ones who have joined the bandwagon that encourages bashing men, ought to look back on their very profitable history of working with and championing the hands that still feed (and probably finger bang) them. Portman, at the time barely eked by on her own disparaging remark toward Hollywood homogeneity. And it might have almost been totally carried off if not for her own recent misstep in allowing herself to be cast in Annihilation, based on a book from a trilogy touting the protagonists as being of Asian American and Native American descent. But apparently, actors and directors don’t read the source material their projects are based on (even though if someone paid me multiple millions of dollars for a job, I could probably find the time to do a little more fucking background research), as evidenced by Portman’s admission, “That does sound problematic, but I’m hearing it here first…” and director Alex Garland’s apologist comment, “As a middle-aged white man, I can believe I might at times be guilty of unconscious racism, in the way that potentially we all are. But there was nothing cynical or conspiratorial about the way I cast this movie.” So come on Stone, forgive the middle-aged white men (all two of them that were nominated in the category you ripped to shreds), they know not what they do. Just like you.
