Several days ago The Marvels director Nia La Costa shared some disapproving sentiments about Marvel fanboys with Variety‘s Angelique Jackson.
Now, wrote Jackson, The Marvels is “flooded with comments criticizing Disney for ‘going woke’ and rooting for the film to flop.”
Some of what La Costa said seemed to echo the complaints of last February’s sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis — all of whom claimed that their films got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
“Andrea Riseborough + Duelling Concepts of Meritocracy vs. Equity,” posed on 2.15.23 or nine months ago:
We’re all familiar with the recent complaints about the Oscar nominations by the sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis.
In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.
In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.
Prince-Blythewood: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”
Deadwyler: “We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”
The essence of the lament seemed to be “we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”
In short, the sore losers were saying that in this time of revolutionary overhaul and the diminishing of Hollywood’s white-male heirarchy, equity needs to count as much as meritocracy (and perhaps even a bit more) in terms of handing out Oscar nominations.