The 2023 Oscars: a Prime Example of Why Black Women Don’t Trust White “Feminists”

Joy D'Angelo
ZORA
Published in
15 min readMar 12, 2023

--

Photo of Oscar Statuette (Creative Commons/Public Domain)

These are difficult times in America, so it seems a little frivolous to be discussing the 95th Annual Academy Awards. There is though, some insight to be gleaned about the state of race relations in the so-called progressive wing of the nation. When the Oscar nominations came out neither Viola Davis for The Woman King nor Danielle Deadwyler for Till made the cut for the Best Actress nod. This caused a lot of Hollywood “shock.”

Meanwhile, Andrea Riseborough wason the list for a movie that most people had never heard of To Leslie. Her nomination had the most controversy around it, but also on the list was Ana de Armas from the film Blonde, a film people had heard of, but not for very good reasons. The NC-17 film about the blonde bombshell Marylin Monroe was horribly reviewed and had a very limited theatrical release before premiering on Netflix.

So, one movie that hardly anyone saw and another one that did the bare minimum to even qualify for nominations and, outside of the work by the lead actress, was panned made the Oscars list. Meanwhile, two critically acclaimed films, one of which was also a solid box office success, did not. Some analysis out there rightly argued that these were examples of systemic racism in Hollywood. However, a system can’t work without all of its parts…

--

--

ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Joy D'Angelo
Joy D'Angelo

Written by Joy D'Angelo

A forever student...who can't afford grad school.