Muslims had a share in it.. Did we witness Oscar 2022 with new standards?

Contrary to what has prevailed over the years, not everyone paid much attention to the films that won the Oscars at its 94th gala in March 2022, but rather a small incident that occurred on the red carpet was highlighted.

While all eyes were on the host, comedian Chris Rock, making a joke about Jada Smith, wife of American actor Will Smith, the hall erupted with laughter, including Smith himself, but his smile faded after his wife in question gave him a sharp and meaningful look, and so Smith took the stage I landed a thunderous slap on the lieutenant colonel.

In the midst of the announcer's attempts to remedy the situation, Will Smith shouted at him not to dare mention his wife again.

A few days later, the Academy opened an investigation into the incident, events recurred and Will Smith submitted his resignation from it, to be accepted by the institution immediately.

But what not everyone realizes in the midst of all that slapstick "Trend" controversy is that the Oscars themselves were dramatically different this year.

Gossip over a fancy dinner

In the twenties of the last decade, while the cinema was progressing rapidly to transcend the era of silence in its films into speech, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed, and it was only a short period until the organization held a dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, in which the attendance did not exceed 270 people, and no more than 270 people attended. The entrance ticket at that time exceeded five dollars (1).

On that night, it was decided to present a prestigious annual award that attracts attention to the Academy, and is the most famous in the field of cinema, to be deserved, and to be awarded to the best film, director and actor, as one of the forms of supporting excellence in the aspects of film production and honoring every achievement in that industry.

However, the following years ensured that the award reversed its neutrality and marked it with bias, corruption and ignoring minorities, and the memory recalled several facts that support this view, such as Hattie McDaniel, the first black actress, winning the Academy Award in 1939, and setting up a separate table for her in a hidden back part of the ceremony at the time.

Hattie McDaniel, the first black actress, won an Academy Award in 1939.

To refute these accusations, the award administration set new technical standards two years ago about the requirements that must be met to qualify the work for the Best Film Award (2) (3), including diversity and fair representation of women and minorities in front of and behind the screen. Have these conditions entered into force?

Nominations and winners

This year, the competition was fierce between the following films: "The Power of the Dog" by Jane Campion, "West Side Story" by Spielberg, "Licorice Pizza" by Thomas Anderson, "King Richard", "Nightmare Alley", "Belfast", "Coda" and "Don't Look Up" And the Japanese film based on the story of Haruki Murakami, which won Best Foreign Film "Drive My Car" and "Dune" in the major categories (4).

The movie "Dune" swept the Night of Dreams, winning in six categories, including cinematography, production design and stunning music, which the German musician Hans Zimmer deserved the Oscar for, but the name of the work director David Villeneuve remained missing in the list of best directors, which constituted A surprise for everyone.

Perhaps Villeneuve was not nominated because the list was really crammed with heavyweights like Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kenneth Branagh, Ryosuke Hamaguchi, and possibly Jane Campion, the latter of which won Best Director for the aforementioned work "The Power of the Dog." Dog), to go down in history as the first woman to be nominated for Best Director twice (5).

However, the real surprise is the victory of "Coda", which is the budget work for which Apple bought the broadcast rights, so that his selection raised the audience's astonishment, along with two other films in particular, so we decided to focus on all three of them, by throwing Look closely to see if the award is part of its transformation to become truly more inclusive in providing opportunities for different groups and ethnicities.

koda

“Coda” is an abbreviation for “Child of deaf adults”, which means that you are the child of one or both of the deaf adults (6).

The title undercuts the general theme of the film, whose writer-director Sian Heder won Best Adapted Screenplay, and Troy Kotsur as the father won Best Supporting Actor, making him the first deaf man to win an Academy Award for acting (7).

While the first deaf actress nominated and won the award was Marley Matlin in 1986 for the movie “Children of a Lesser God” about a girl who dedicates her life to translating in sign language for her family, facing a struggle between continuity in that and focusing on her future (8).

Haider did not belong to the deaf community for which she singled out the starring of her second feature film (9) (10), but she tried to get to know the culture of a sect that has not yet been represented by revealing the identities of her characters, and bringing in a crew mostly from her core as the main actors from father, mother and son, that point It is precisely what distinguished the film and its duration in a different dimension.

Like films about the challenges that characters face in adulthood, Koda follows the usual trend.

Heder casts her heroine, Ruby, a teenage girl in high school, who is more like the family's interpreter in their day-to-day dealings as the only member who listens.

It tears her into two different identities, like a fishing boat that flounders a little in the first shots of the movie, before we hear a relatively loud singing voice from Ruby, then the rest of her family clears us through their daily routine of fishing and selling fish at the crack of dawn.

In the director's attempts to add lightness to her film, heavy humor sometimes overwhelms the dramatic moments and makes them ridiculous, which builds an impenetrable barrier through which we are unable to look into the depths of the characters and probe their depths.

Perhaps what Heder does pass on to us is the limited need for verbal language and voice with boundless love, the weight of the path and the challenges that Ruby has to face.

There is no doubt, then, that the work has its advantages and disadvantages, as the deaf saw in it what expresses them, even in part, while several takeaways were taken from it (11), as some of them considered it to have dropped the real problems they face, such as the inability to contact their parents in the event of a crisis, or translation. In the emotionally charged moments for them, Heder conveyed the view that the deaf person is a burden, when many of them are independent and highly efficient, not to mention the different means of communication such as mobile phone applications, lip reading, or just writing with a pen on paper.

King Richard... deserved or earned victory?

In contact with Heder, director Reinaldo Marcus Green and writer Zack Palin infuse their "King Richard" with humor that is more of a defensive mechanism for the protagonist to mask his fears, less revealed in jest than in Will Smith's mostly word-of-mouth performance. It's almost time, until you imagine that he is indulging himself before others.

We may have known Will Smith in the role of a dedicated and stubborn father, as in the biographical film "The Pursuit of Happyness", based on the story of businessman Christopher Gardner, in which he was nominated for an Oscar, and if he only received it now in his new movie "King Richard", will Was it a deserved win?

And on what basis?

The character here must make a difference between her fatherhood and her work as a coach who supervises the training of his daughters, as Richard devises a 78-page plan for the careers of his two daughters before having them, so that his daughters will grow up with modest living possibilities and a persistent and supportive father who believes strongly in them despite all obstacles and everything Desperate, he takes them to country clubs and elite academies, assuring them in no uncertain terms that they have every right to be there, despite condescending suspicion and outright hostility, so that what they hoped for may eventually be fulfilled, and his daughters, Venus and Serena, become among the world's best tennis players.

The film did not lose sight of the story of the rise of Venus and Serena, and the shift in the balance of power with each match in which Richard retreats and watches from afar, devoting himself to one role as a supportive father (12).

Nor does the work go into much detail about Richard Williams, only eliciting fragments from his 2014 memoir Black and White: The Way I See It, but using key details that define his character, such as his coming Against a backdrop of poverty and racism, his emotional father deserted him, who gave him a frightening need to teach his girls humility and to do for them what his father had denied him.

(13,14)

Accordingly, the award that Will Smith received for “King Richard” may not have been due because of the film itself, but the committee considered the entirety of the actor’s work and history and not winning the award in advance, and accordingly decided to award him the award in the end.

long farewell

What also came as a surprise to many was the Pakistani-born British actor and rapper Riz Ahmed winning his first Oscar for Best Animated Short Film titled "The Long Goodbye", which he co-wrote and starred in collaboration with director Anil Karia (16).

Ahmed was the first Muslim to be nominated for a Best Actor at the Oscars last year for his role as a hard-of-hearing drummer in a short film called Sound of Metal, although he did not win it at the time (17).

The film emerged from personal concerns about the rise of discrimination and intolerance around the world, and its reference was a study entitled “Absence and Defamation” carried out by the “Annenberg Inclusion Initiative”, which concluded that less than 10% of high-income films between 2017-2019 in the United Kingdom and the United States And Australia included Muslim personalities to whom part of the dialogue was assigned, so their appearance was marginal, humiliating, or posed an imminent or potential threat. Indeed, in about a third of those personalities, their appearance was associated with violence or was a target for it (18).

Ahmed refuses to continue presenting this image to Muslims, and repeats on various media platforms: “The progress made by a few of us does not give an image of general progress, as the depiction of Muslims on the screen remains either non-existent or governed by toxic perceptions of stereotypical two-dimensional characters.. In these divided times, we think the role of the story is to remind us that there is no “us” and “them,” there is only “us.”(19).

In his nearly 12-minute film, Ahmed touches on Islamophobia in the UK (20), and inserts music from his eponymous album to embody a character who is the heart of a busy family.

We meet him as he dances with his younger brother, criticizes another brother before he gets into an argument with his father, and then goes upstairs in their house, where a group of girls get dressed up for the wedding that everyone is preparing for.

She is a family descended from South Asia, living in a suburb of Britain, and the sound of news reports about armed white militias rising between the walls of her house. We see that group knocking on the doors of their house violently before they penetrate it and terrify the family, then they attract them to the street and attack them, to find Ahmed himself in The end is alone and handcuffed in the open, and he begins to sing faintly angry, asking questions that have been abandoned, so that his voice is like a revolution against all the fears and violations that the world did not do justice to.

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