@thirdmanmovies
Pop Culture critic/journalist/historian Writing: The Ringer, IndieWire, Vanity Fair, Roger Ebert, Cosmo, The Verge Former: Sundance Copy Editor OCPD 🫠 Letterboxd: Djoyaux Also love and may post about: basketball, comics, dogs, democracy
Very off topic, but I thought you might enjoy this piece I wrote about a very interesting Oscar race this weekend, and the long, problematic history behind it:
www.rogerebert.com/festivals/wh...
Not a name I expected to see this week, Michael!
I saw this notification and I got really excited the Dan in question was me, and that this post was about my piece from today making the case for why Ryan Coogler should win Best Director on Sunday.
Alas.
(But this is also a great piece)
Love this
Avatar also received zero nominations from the two largest branches of the Academy—actors and writers.
Sinners is heavily lauded by those two branches.
Also! It’s instructive that you brought up Bigelow. Arguably the reason Cameron lost is because voters were attracted to the idea of awarding Best Director to a woman for the first very time.
Notably, voters don’t seem remotely as enthused to award Best Director to a Black person for the first time
Yes.
But receiving the most Oscar noms in a year and receiving the most Oscar noms EVER are two very different achievements.
(1/)
83 points is the perfect total for Bam, because that’s how many guesses it would’ve taken me to name him if you asked me who might score 83 points in a game
I wrote about the problematic history of the Oscars recognizing the work of Black directors.
I’m really proud of this one, so please spread it far and wide. It’s an important convo that’s been sadly absent from the Oscars discourse this year.
Your point about binding precedent is a good one
I genuinely believe that if a white guy made a movie that received the same box office grosses, critical acclaim, and record nomination haul as Sinners, that person would never ever ever lose Best Director.
I don’t think the Academy is reluctant to award Black people in general, but I absolutely believe many voters intrinsically don’t see Black directors—specifically directors—as award worthy to the same degree.
(1/2)
But I don’t think PGAs history and precedent is widely known in the way it is with the Oscars.
How many PGA voters even knew that? Not many, I would guess.
Fair enough, I deleted
In any case—I do want to say that I appreciate you reading it and engaging with it on a content level, even if we disagree. I hope you think it was at least thought-provoking and worth your time.
Again, 16 nominations—breaking the record by two—for an original, critically adored film that outcrossed three Marvel movies.
Be honest: do you think a white guy would EVER lose Best Director for such a movie?
Because I absolutely do not.
That’s where, I believe, the sample size becomes significant enough precisely because the stated reasoning flipped in the opposite direction.
Two opposite sets of mutually exclusive reasoning, both deployed for why the Black person should lose.
I agree that 3 cases would be too small a sample to draw a meaningful conclusion from if all three cases were similar.
But as I say—the first two cases involve the Black director losing because they made the important movie rather than the showy movie. The third case is the polar opposite.
(1/)
I definitely think it’s out of context. It’s the final sentence of a 25+ paragraph piece, which is a long argument compounded by a lot of data.
Any such conclusion, absent all of the exhaustive data and reasoning, is literally and definitionally contextless.
Ohhhhhhh
Well that’s very different!
I’m curious—am I the dummy who badly misread that screenshotted tweet, or was that tweet just abhorently written and begging to be interpreted in the exact way I did?
Trust me, I am trusted friend
It’s not in context
There’s a paragraph in the piece where I write about people who will think they know what the piece is without reading it, and exactly what misreading they’ll have.
I promise the piece isn’t what you think it is. It’s almost all data and numbers.
I really liked Blitz as part of McQueen’s overall arc, and a return to his initial themes.
I think of his first three films as a trilogy about why we suffer—for a cause (Hunger), for addiction (Shame), and for cruelty (12 Years).
Then Blitz added to that—suffering as pure collateral damage.
I wrote about you in the piece
Always a shock when belligerent idiots don’t anticipate completely obvious outcomes
I hadn’t even considered that. But I also don’t think it was. To me, it reeks of the casually racist double standards that people operate on all the time, but which wouldn’t be programmed into an AI model (except by Elon).
I could certainly be wrong, though.
That screenshot is really the perfect headline for a day that I wrote about the egregious double standards of casual racism:
www.rogerebert.com/festivals/wh...
That screenshot is the perfect headline for a day that I wrote about the egregious double standards of casual racism:
www.rogerebert.com/festivals/wh...