There’s a Problem with the 2025 Oscars Nominations

The Oscar nominations are out, and you know what that means : everyone is mad! Or they don’t care, I guess. I do have some sympathy for the academy - between the apathy or the average moviegoer and the opinionated cinephiles, they can’t really win. What I don’t have sympathy for, though, is the way their internal biases keep affecting what art gets noticed and rewarded. Because don’t let them fool you with all the changes they claim to have made since #Oscarssowhite - there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Don’t believe me? Just look at this year’s nominees.

I’ve always had a skill for noticing injustices, even in their small and “everyday” form. It’s why I was offered a research position at a university after just one undergraduate communications class, and it's why a lot of my content on Peliplat touches on issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. I might not have the most personal or the most professional perspective, but I still try to bring attention to media and representation that I think is worth questioning - which brings us to this year’s Oscar nominees.

You can tell the academy is really trying to make changes to avoid another #Oscarssowhite situation. Films that center “minority” stories are nominated for Best Picture, like The Brutalist and Nickel Boys. Non-white and non-cisgender actors are in the running for Best Actor and Best Actress. If you’re going just off numbers, it looks like a lot has changed. The only issue is that fixing systemic injustice isn’t just a numbers game. It’s not a game at all - it’s about authentic and diverse representation. And that’s what the Oscars still seem to be missing.

To understand what I mean, we have to look at the films that have been nominated. Nickel Boys and Sing, Sing both focus on the trauma of the African-American experience, with the latter taking place in a prison and the former in a prison-like reform school. The Brutalist is about a Jewish Holocaust survivor’s post-war experience and A Real Pain is in part about dealing with the lingering grief of the Holocaust as a modern Jewish person. Wicked, though arguably not about racism since Elphaba is, y’know, green, deals with issues of marginalisation that parallel real-life discrimination.

Already there’s a pattern forming : minority stories deserve recognition - so long as they’re about pain and trauma. Then there's also Emilia Perez’s questionable nomination despite having been criticised as being culturally insensitive and poorly representing trans issues. Hell, even Dune can’t escape. While it’s arguably a criticism of the white saviour narrative, we haven’t quite gotten to the criticism part of the narrative yet.

So yeah, the numbers are there so people can’t say #Oscarssowhite... but that doesn't mean the films being chosen are good representation, not when the stories are all so negative.

To be clear, I’m not saying that any of these films are bad or don’t deserve to be nominated (except maybe Emilia Perez 🥴). If I’m entirely honest, I haven’t yet had the time to watch all of them. But unless I’m missing something in their summaries, the fact that the only films nominated focus on negative experiences or stereotypes isn’t a great look. It's not that those aren’t valid experiences, but they're far from the only experiences.

If you still don’t quite get what I mean, just look at the nominations for stories about white men : Conclave, A Complete Unknown, The Apprentice, none of them focus on the trauma of being a white man, and it isn’t because there’s no trauma to be explored there. It’s because white men are still seen as the “default character”, so they get to have stories that are about more than just their identity. That’s what real representation looks like : not stories about gay people or Asian people but about people. Reducing people down to their identity and its associated pain is dehumanising. It makes it seem like the only interesting part of their lives is their trauma, not their love or their joy or their growth. And honestly? I think that's might be worse than having no representation at all.

This year’s Oscar nominations are unfortunately just a reflection a deeper societal misunderstanding of what representation means - or at least, I hope its a misunderstanding and not just apathy. Still, it's not a total wash. At least we can at least take this opportunity to reflect on who’s choosing which stories get platformed, the narratives they create and reinforce with their choices, and whether or not those are narratives we agree with. Maybe then we’ll realise that it's time we stop letting other people determine how we see the world, even if the numbers say they’re doing a good job of it.


A quick closing question : can anybody recommend any movies that should have been nominated that aren’t just about how awful it is to be non-white/non-cis/non-straight? I'm losing more and more faith in award shows each year, so I'd really appreciate any recommendations for movies I might have missed. Thanks in advance!

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