‘Green Book’ and the Academy Awards

Four years after #OscarsSoWhite was hashtag-born, the Oscars ceremony saw a record rendering of diversity: In addition to seven black artists receiving awards in multiple categories, Asian filmmakers won best documentary and best animated short, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron won for best director, best cinematography and best foreign language film — and a group of young female filmmakers won best documentary short for a film about the stigma associated with menstruation. That’s a welcome sea change for a motion picture academy so hidebound four years ago that it nominated not a single person of color in any of the four acting categories. Since then, the academy has swelled its ranks with hundreds of new voting members who are women and people of color.

The increase in diversity, however, didn’t prevent Oscar voters from making some controversial choices about films centered on people of color. Most of the friction was over the awards (notably, the Oscars for best picture and best original screenplay) going to “Green Book,” a film about a racist white man who takes a job chauffeuring a gifted black concert pianist around the segregated South. To the film’s critics, and there are many, the awards for “Green Book” showed that Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters still fall for the old “white savior” tropes and films that resolve deep-seated conflicts with feel-good Hollywood endings by the time the final credits roll.