Awards
Gina Prince-Bythewood Condemns The Oscars’ Message After Black Female Led
Gina Prine-Bythewood is the director of the brand new 2023 film The Woman King. The film is set in 1800s Africa, where an all-woman army fights a foreign nation’s enemy to protect their homeland of Dahomey. The lead of the film is none other than the legendary veteran actress Viola Davis who has starred in films like Fences and Widows and TV shows such as How To Get Away With Murder. The actress was not nominated for Best Actress 2023, which was considered a major snub, with a lot of controversy rising for Andrea Riseborough’s nomination instead.
Prince-Bythewood’s Opinion On The Snubs
The Woman King director who has worked on films like The Old Guard and Beyond The Lights. The director felt that all the black female-created and led films were intentionally snubbed and left out in every category. She felt that the academy was delivering a certain message to her that she can no longer ignore.
The films that were ignored included Till by Chinonye Chukwu as well as Saint-Omer by Alice Diop. She talked to The Hollywood Reporter about what these snubs meant to her not only as a black director but as a woman:
I am currently a producer on a project, and the executives were adamant that the director we chose be a Black Oscar-winning director. While that sounds great, who would that be? In the 95-year history of the Academy Awards, no Black filmmaker has ever won best director. No Black woman has ever been nominated.
It is true that the academy has had a long unforgivable history of racial biases, specifically towards black women. Viola Davis, the lead of The Woman King, has had one Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Fences. She has worked for just as long as Meryl Streep, who has won three Oscars in his lifetime and been nominated a whopping 21 times. No one could argue that Davis has played less impressive roles than Streep herself, and yet, she’s had only four total nominations. She talked about how she approached watching films:
I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once and Top Gun: Maverick because I heard they were really good. When you hear that, you go to the movie. Or you look at the trailer and say, “I want to see that. That looks good to me.” We, Black women, do not get that same grace. So the question we need to ask is, “Why is it so hard to relate to the work of your Black peers?” What is this inability of Academy voters to see Black women, and their humanity, and their heroism, as relatable to themselves?
Clearly, she feels hurt by the sheer intentional ignorance of the academy. Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler were the obvious choices for at least a Best Actress nomination, but that did not end up happening either. Andrea Riseborough gave a very impactful performance in To Leslie, however, the role was not talked about until the Oscars buzz.
Lots of celebrities began hosting screenings for the film, and it rose to fame in the eyes of the academy. Meanwhile, powerful performances by black female actresses were forgotten. Was this a deliberate move to cast out black female actresses, or was it just an innocent coincidence? Prince-Bythewood thinks it’s part of the lifelong quest of the academy to leave out black artists:
It’s a reflection of where the Academy stands and the consistent chasm between Black excellence and recognition. And, sadly, this is not just an issue in Hollywood but in every industry. I’m going to use a Dr. King quote because it is so apropos, in that he spoke on the “lie of [our] inferiority accepted as truth in the society dominating us.”
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