In a new series called Mondo Appropriato, Culled Culture examines how “on the nose” something is in the pop cultural and/or political landscape.
Outrage being the norm these days, it was entirely expected that people would express dismay over Chadwick Boseman losing out to Anthony Hopkins for the coveted Best Actor award at the 93rd Annual Oscars. An announcement that somehow got moved to being the last award on the night’s docket (as everyone knows, traditionally, Best Picture is saved for the finale). It proved to backfire as a “plot twist” for those who were expecting Boseman to win.
And yet, what about anything in the Academy’s (or society’s) history would indicate to people that Boseman would quote unquote get his due. Why? Just because he’s Black? Just because he’s dead? No. Everybody with the good sense to be cynical enough knows that you still have to be an old ass white man to win anything of “high prestige.” Let us take, for example, the idea that was solidified during the 2016 election: a woman cannot win what is deemed the highest office in the land. Instead, the nation would rather pick an incompetent orange toad to run their affairs so long as he generally falls into the category of “white” male (tinted like a Cheeto or not). All the better when he is an old white male.
This running motif continued in the 2020 election, when it took yet another old white male (and one also accused of sexual misconduct) to secure a woman’s position as not president, but vice president. We have to, apparently, continue to take baby steps with allowing women to do much of anything. Wasn’t it enough for them to get out of the kitchen? concerned misogynists want to know. To add to the absurdity, Joe Biden would become the oldest president to be elected in U.S. history. Yes, America was willing to choose any candidate barely breathing so long as it wasn’t Trump again (try as the insurrectionists might to tell you the election was “stolen”).
Last night, Anthony Hopkins would become the oldest actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Are we sensing a pattern here? A certain profound symbolism that patriarchy holds on forever and always. And that even when you think “a change gon’ come,” the same fucking system just keeps mutating into something that continues to allow it to thrive, while others have to “work within it” in order to gain a modicum of deserved recognition.
No one is saying Hopkins isn’t a fantastic actor. He’s proved that repeatedly throughout his career. And he already has the Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs to prove it. Wouldn’t it have been a welcome change to have given someone who literally put their dying breaths into a performance a chance…some reverent recognition? And yes, specifically not someone who was a white man? Let’s not call this an “affirmative action” vote so much as a vote that doesn’t signal just how little one’s hard work actually matters. Not when they don’t fall into the metaphorical embodiment of a last gasp of patriarchy. But is it any last gasp when, at every turn, there you go still seeing old straight white men ruling everything around us?
It is, instead, a continued and sustained breath that will seemingly never be choked out. The power, it appears, is too concentrated within this faction for it to ever be.
