There Are Two Ways To Interpret What Natalie Portman Said About The Oscars This Week, And Either Interpretation Makes Her - And Hollywood - Look Terrible

 

 

At this point in my career as a critic as well as someone who has been observing Hollywood for nearly two decades I'm sadly used to celebrities making statements that reveal their own ignorance. Usually it has to do with politics, both foreign and domestic, and while I've never happy when they do it I can excuse it to an extent if not forgive it. They're entertainers and entertainers aren't qualified to talk about much but their industry.

Now as we've seen over the past several months many of the performers are starting to criticize their industry for not being moral because it puts profits over people. This has been tone-deaf that they're willing to take checks from these corporation their entire lives and it is in fact the reason they are rich and famous. I've been writing about that glaring omission.

But it astonishes me that there are some celebrities who are so blinded by their own narrative they don't even seem to be aware of events in their own industry that clearly prove them wrong. And yet that is what Natalie Portman did earlier this week when she chose to say that the Academy Award had 'snubbed women directors this year'.

Not unfairly represented. Omitted.

Now to be blunt the Oscars is not the same when Portman made her film debut in 1991. It's not even the same when she was last nominated for an Oscar for Jackie back in 2016.  To that point in Oscar history they had only nominated four women for Best Director in the previous 90 years.

Now let's look at the last decade.

In 2021 for the first time in history two women were nominated for Best Director: Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman and Chloe Zhao for Nomadland. Zhao won Best Director that year as Nomadland took Best Picture and  Fennell won Best Original Screenplay. In 2022 Jane Campion won Best Director for Power of the Dog. In 2023 people were annoyed that Sarah Polley wasn't nominated for Best Director but she did win Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking.

In 2023 Justine Von Triet was nominated for directing Anatomy of A Fall, the first female director to be nominated for directing an international feature that was also nominated for Best Picture. (We'll get back to that.) Last year Coralie Fargeat was nominated for directing, producing and writing The Substance.

So there have been as many women nominated for directing in the past five years by the Academy Awards as their were in the previous 95. I'd like to think that's at least progress.

Now on Thursday Chloe Zhao was nominated for Best Director for the second time, only the second female director in history to receive two nominations for directing. (The other is Campion.) This is only Zhao's fifth feature as a director. Her pronouns are she/her if I have to spell it out.

Now the charitable explanation, the best case scenario for Portman, is that she had somehow completely missed the fact that Hamnet was nominated for Best Picture or that she has somehow spent the entire awards ceremony unaware of Zhao's presence. This requires a spectacular level of blindness considering how much Hamnet has been making the awards circuit for months, if not years and ignored the fact that it is co-produced by Steven Spielberg. It means she completed missed the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards and didn't see Zhao accept the prize for Best Picture at the Golden Globes at the latter and somehow missed everyone of Jessie Buckley's acceptance speeches.

That would require a remarkable level of obliviousness particularly to someone who has been a Hollywood fixture. However I have to say it is preferable to the alternative.

As I pointed out when the Oscar nominations came out in 2024 I wrote a long article about Justine Von Triet's accomplishment but:

…the big story in Hollywood today is how Greta Gerwig was snubbed by the Oscars for directing Barbie even though the film was nominated for eight other awards including Best Picture. The fact that Gerwig was nominated for producing and writing the film will be overlooked in the long saga of how another woman director was ignored. I imagine there will be some who will argue that Triet’s nomination was done so the Oscars could say they nominated a female director but ignore Gerwig. The possibility that Anatomy of A Fall is  a better film will not enter into the discussion at all because everybody saw Barbie and ‘no one’ saw Anatomy of A Fall. That the film took Best International Film and Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes and Barbie was basically ignored by them will do nothing to convince these people of the toxic sexism in Hollywood.

There’s a longer story to be told about the xenophobia that has always plagued the Oscars and has always regulated films that are not made in America to second class at best. I might end up writing that article someday.

Well, I've been writing about the xenophobia indirectly and I'll finish that series but let's consider Portman's statements in a larger context.

Zhao is Chinese even though she's made her last four films in America. It was tricky to make the argument of xenophobia with Von Triet's nomination in place of Gerwig in 2024: it's always been trickier to make that argument with European directors these days though Hollywood has an unfortunate history with that. It's a lot harder to ignore it in the case of saying that Zhao doesn't seem to be considered a female director in the eyes of Portman and that Eva Victor – one of the names she mentioned as being slighted – is one of merit.

It's even harder to ignore a different kind of racism. This year Sinners became the most nominated film in the history of the Academy Awards with 16 nominations.  There was a lot of controversy about how the box office returns were weighted because the industry wasn't comfortable with having a film with an African-American director and featuring an almost entirely African-American cast and crew doing so well at the box office.

When you consider Coogler and Zhao's success and Portman's seemingly oblivious statements it is very hard not to read an undertone into it.  This is by any standard one of the most diverse group of nominees the Oscars has had in my lifetime and we definitely see it in Best Director. Coogler has become only the fifth African-American to earn a nomination for directing for Sinners and Joachim Trier is joining the expanding list of directors of International Films to earn nominations for direction. Combined with Zhao's history making accomplishment one would be hard pressed to argue about the Academy Awards lack of diversity. And that's without counting the writing nominees which include Guillermo Del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein and the team from It Was Just an Accident.

Portman's statement could almost be considered being a wet blanket were it not for her apparent ignorance of the facts. There is no scenario where Portman doesn't look clueless and that is, as I said, the best case scenario. The alternative makes her sound very close to a Karen who's upset that all these 'colored people' are endangering white women.

And while I'm not the kind of person who wants to read into things its difficult for me not to see this as a metaphor for so many things in our society. An institution exists for extended period in our society. Grumbling from those who believe (not without cause) that they have been unjustly excluded for decades demand change and reform. That institution eventually gives that reform but it does nothing to end the grumbling. At best it is considered under the metric "better late than never", at worst there is always the complain that inclusion of one group comes at the expense of another and therefore it is still inadequate.

Well you can't get more left-leaning than Hollywood, particularly in the last decade. The Academy Awards have seen a significant amount of reform to their voting process and minority nominees are being recognized at a greater rate than any time in the near century that the institution exists. Yet little credit is given to the Academy and the exclusions are still pointed out as signs of the deep flaws even when in many cases their imagined. No one bothers to pretend that the Oscars were ever a meritocracy and now its considered more important that representation from a race or gender in every category is there whether or not their was an actor or director worthy of recognition in the first place.

And I have to say considering how low-stakes the Oscars are compared to everything else in the world the fact that someone like Portman can make these statements in the same breath as events in Minnesota and give the same weight of importance and seriousness shows a special kind of obliviousness. The fact that the part about female directors being snubbed is complete at odds with something that happened this week is the kind of thing that dismantles why anyone should take a celebrity seriously about anything they say. It's the kind of news clip that right wing media salivate to have because they don't even have to bother to play it out of context. In context Portman looks clueless at best.

All of this speaks to how so much in Hollywood that used to be taken less seriously is now considered a blood sport. It used to be fun to joke about who was and wasn't nominated for an Oscar; now being excluded is now a sign of some kind of systemic blindness even if there is none. As Bill Murray famously said in so much about the Oscars: "Who cares?" Now not only is clearly they done but that they care for the wrong reasons and that takes a lot of the joy out of it.

Whenever I hear a celebrity talk about anything that isn't related to their industry the explanation is that because they have a platform they feel an obligation to use it to speak on issues they care about. Even if I agreed with that as a premise that doesn't make them any more of an expert than the average Gen Z on TikTok. Just because Natalie Portman played Jackie Kennedy she's not qualified to talk about Cold War politics in the 1960s, the Freedom Riders or even whether Jackie Kennedy knew about Marilyn Monroe. Natalie Portman didn't become an expert on Jackie Kennedy because she played her in a film and she doesn't know anything about policy in the Middle East for decades better than the Ambassador to Jordan or immigration policy.  Honestly strictly from a class perspective she has more in common with Melania or Ivanka Trump then any of the women protesting in Minneapolis. What she is qualified to talk about is her industry and as her comments about the Oscars and female directors being shut out reveal she doesn't even seem qualified to talk about that.

Every time a celebrity talks about anything that doesn't relate to Hollywood they are always out of their depths intellectually, politically and from a perspective of common sense. Portman's statement about female directors leave us thinking there are two explanations for what she said and neither reflect well on her or the industry's moral authority in general. I continue to beg them to stay in their lane and concentrate on their job of entertaining us, if for no other reason than they're not helping anybody the way they want to think. It's bad enough you're not helping with your ignorance on the subject of politics; do you have to keep showing you don't even know what happened in your industry on Thursday?