Is Hashtag Activism a Failure?
I gave up on the Oscars years ago but, and perhaps it is the removal of a highly cynical spouse that predicates it, I'm gaining interest again. It might be the absolute wealth of really good film being thrown at screens large and small at a torrential rate or just an increased love for film because we were locked out of theaters for a while. Whatever the cause, the result is that for the first time in probably a decade, I'm interested again.
Of course, once the nominees were announced, the grousing began. No women directors were nominated. No black actors in the Best Actor category. No black actors in the Best Actress category. There are just two African Americans among the acting nominees: Angela Bassett in supporting actress for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Bryan Tyree Henry in supporting actor for Causeway. On the other hand, it was a banner year for Asian artists across the board.
What to make of it?
The Oscars are a popularity contest. It is a subjective vote on a subjective matter: film. Was She Said a better movie than Avatar: The Way of Water? Depends on who you ask and what their tastes are but to say that one film deserves the nod because it was a feminist film regardless of taste is silly. Is it weird that Sarah Polley's Women Talking was nominated for Best Picture but she was left out of the Director noms? Maybe except that the entire membership votes on Best Picture but only the director members vote on the other and who are we to dictate what they saw and reacted to? While many found Till to be a moving and remarkable film there were more that found it tedious and underdeveloped. Whaddya gonna do? Subjectivity is a bitch.
A USC Annenberg report found that of the 111 directors hired to make the 100 top-grossing movies last year, just 9% were women. That was down from 12.7% in 2021. At the same time, the number of Black, Asian, Hispanic/Latino and multi-racial and multi-ethnic moviemakers also fell from 27.3% in 2021 to 20.7% in 2022. Women of color accounted for a mere 2.7% of directors of the top 100 movies last year. The declines come as the movie business, and particularly the major studios that call the shots, have been under pressure to provide more opportunities to female artists and people of color in the wake of social justice and advocacy movements such as #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite.
These hashtag campaigns have absolutely created international awareness of the issues at hand but seem to have backfired in the implementation of change.
Right now, women make up roughly half the workforce (and more than half of the college-educated workforce) but only a fraction of executive teams. For example, in the financial services industry, they constituted 61% of accountants and auditors, 53% of financial managers, and 37% of financial analysts in 2018 but only 12.5% of chief financial officers in Fortune 500 companies.
A Morning Consult poll found that even when respondents expressed support for more women leaders and gender pay equity, they were less likely to support the changes within their own companies. And when asked about hiring more women in leadership roles, 73% of respondents advocated for it in other companies; only 44% said that this was something their own company should do.
It is also clear that the #BlackLivesMatter movement, sparked in 2014 and supercharged in 2020 has largely failed, as well.
Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began. Politically, a powerful faction inside the movement sought to elect more radical progressives; Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the next presidential elections. That same faction sought to “defund the police”; police budgets are now rising, and “defund” is unpopular with majorities of every racial group.
Whether or not you think those reforms should have prevailed, they did not. If impact matters more than intent, the criminal-justice-reform movement needs an alternative to #BlackLivesMatter that has better prospects for actually improving real lives. Today, almost every American is aware of police killings as an issue. Awareness has been raised, and returns are diminished.
From the sheer amount of public awareness generated by both the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, one would think the needle would've moved in the direction of prescribed equity but the needles in both causes have moved in the other direction despite the best efforts of so many in so many different sectors of society. Is it just racism and sexism to blame or is there something more at play?
I think the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag is instructive in finding something more honest than the tried and true boogeymen of bigotry and misogyny. What happened?
First, even in Hollywood, the most left-leaning segment of society, the loudest voices were coming from the smallest cohort. Twitter activism just isn't comprised of a whole lot of people and Black Twitter is only a slice of that grouping. There was a lot of awareness coming from a tiny bunch of voices who thought they were impacting the larger picture. Turns out maybe they weren't.
Second, and I know how tired this sounds, but it was the tone. Condemnation. Shame. Barely contained rage. Strident. These attitudes were merited and necessary to get things started but there was rarely a gear shift to solutions as if by complaining about it loudly and persistently enough, the problems would solve themselves. Unfortunately, that's not how societal change works. That whole hearts and minds strategy pales in comparison to policies and funding.
Finally, once attention became the currency of society, self interest took over and dominated the cause. Viola Davis, in support of her brilliant performance in The Woman King made the claim that any audience member who declines to financially support and see the film in theaters is “supporting the narrative that Black women cannot lead the box office globally." Elizabeth Banks, referring to her remake of Charlie's Angels, stated “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.” The larger message was suddenly less Go make more diverse movies and more Go see MY movie or you're the problem.
There seems to be at the heart of the hashtag activism at play from #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo, and #TimesUp to #BlackLivesMatter the dictate of anti-racist proselytizer Ibram X. Kendi that past discrimination can only be met with present discrimination and that just isn't true nor a winning position.
I loved The Woman King but I went because I wanted to see the film not because of some guilt about supporting black women. If there was, in my opinion, a snub in these Oscar nominations it's the absence of Jordan Peele and NOPE but not because he's black or the movie featured black artists but because I freaking loved that film.
A friend believes that the fruit of the Twitter/TikTok campaign to reform Hollywood will ripen in about a decade as young filmmakers, increasingly diverse, grow into their craft. I hope so because more stories from all angles benefits us all. There is also the notion that, like the flower children of the sixties, they’ll all grow up and become venture capitalists.
There should be no question that the causes of police reform, decreased sexual harassment and assault, and increases in the diversity of voices financed in Hollywood are righteous and needed. What is also needed are approaches that affect real change rather than retweets.
