Numlock Awards: Anatomy of a Snub
Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter
Earlier this year, there was a minor kerfuffle which deteriorated into about three days of #discourse when Great Gerwig was not recognized with a directing nomination for the film Barbie. One of the more reliable formats following Oscar nominations is the “snubs and surprises” genre of post, which at this point is mostly just grist for the mill of fighting about movies on what remains of the internet.
In general I’m of a couple minds about this, and I can assure you it’s not “sober consternation at the state of discourse.” Mainly:
A little bit of controversy is good. The Oscars thrive on the fact that it is a competition. That said, there’s been a shift.
It used to be we wanted people to win Oscars because they professed that they really wanted to win Oscars. Think the whole feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the stuff that fuels books like Oscar Wars, the people like Bradley Cooper, like Michael Keaton, like Glenn Close, like Diane Warren: these people want this. This is good for the Oscars. It is fun to watch people who want things succeed. Sometimes it’s also fun to watch people who care about stuff lose. It’s human nature, baby.
However! Most people up for an Oscar have apparently been coached by their publicists to not appear to want it that bad. This strategic brand decision, largely fueled by our societal inability to be normal about Anne Hathaway, has caused a tragedy of the commons when it comes to film discourse. In lieu of such gauche yearning, stars defer to their assorted stan armies to duke it out on X. This is bad for the Oscars, as it makes us look insufferable and the awards simply incidental.
My solution to this is “just do more fake feuds,” which I think is the solution to 80 percent of media’s audience problem. It’s why the only things truly succeeding in American media are Barbenheimer (a fake feud), the NFL (272 fake feuds per season) and professional wrestling (a fake feud stunt show). If you would like to set up a fake feud with me, inquire at walt@numlock.news. That said, we’re getting kind of far from the conceit of this newsletter.
Back to Barbie.
Alright, what is a “snub”?
A snub can be described as the difference in the anticipated value of a given contender’s chances and the actual value of a given contender’s chances as decided by vote.
These expectations are largely set by the bread and butter of this newsletter: precursor awards, the guilds and critics’ prizes that award the same stuff the Academy does to varying degrees of reliability.
In this case, Gerwig was nominated by the Directors Guild of America, a valuable precursor award for the direction category, so the fact that the DGA nominated her but the directing branch of the Academy did not was the fuel for much of the difference between the anticipation and the result.
When we learn about that difference, we can form narratives. Was the May December cast snubbed by the actors because it’s a fairly negative take on the craft? Were all the major studio’s documentaries snubbed because the branch resents what that money has done to their field? Was the Barbie snub in direction implicitly sexist?
My answer to that last one is “probably not, as one of the surprises was Justine Triet,” but I also don’t actually really want to get into this quagmire.
I think this actually reveals something way more interesting about the directing category and the difference between the DGA and the directing branch of the Academy.
Yes, it has to do with how the Academy has evolved.
The biggest misconception people have about the Academy is that, as it’s embarked on its expansion from about 6,000 voters pre-#OscarsSoWhite to roughly 10,000 today, that that expansion has been in pursuit of additional diversity.
That is correct, but most Americans miss what the Academy’s definition of diversity is. The Academy is an American organization, but a thing it realized was that it could not succeed as strictly an organization composed of Americans.
When they announce their new invitations every year, the most important sentence that has appeared in every one of those announcements is the boast that more than half of their new members live outside of the United States. The Academy is pursuing diversity, but diversity as it’s understood globally, not the American definition, which strives to make organizations better representative of the racial and ethnic and gender composition of the country as a whole.
Rather, it’s involved inviting a lot of talent from Europe, Asia, and the Global South. We’ve talked about this in this newsletter a bunch of times. But the Director category is actually a really compelling illustration of it, because it allows us to contrast the DGA with the Academy.
The Academy is a global society of film professionals and the DGA is a union.
The DGA is, at its core, a labor organization serving the interests of people who work for American studios, people who disproportionately are Americans. You get in a union because you do specific kinds of work in a country. They’re not selecting their membership — if you work for the studios as a director you join the DGA, with some exceptions I don’t feel like getting into.
The Academy’s directors branch is by invitation only. They’ve been firing off those invites lately: it has grown from 369 members in 2011 to 587 members as of the end of last year, a 59 percent increase that, yes, has drawn significantly from a global talent base not represented in the Academy a decade ago.
How does that impact who gets nominated? Well:
I think this chart is fascinating.
First up, even though the directors branch has grown more global, it’s always favored international talent more than the DGA does. This makes sense, because it’s not the Directors Guild of The World, it’s the Directors Guild of America, and it’s probably going to favor English-language work in general and American work in particular.
One thing I really love about this too is you can actually seen the Anglosphere — the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — really pick up steam among the DGA since 2001, I’d argue in the post-Cool Britannia cultural moment that saw a renewed international interest in work from Britain and other countries in its sphere of influence.
Indeed, since 2010, every director who was nominated by the DGA but snubbed by the Academy was from the English-speaking world, with the mild exception of Denis Villeneuve who is from the part of Canada that speaks French. And yeah, lots of those snubs instead went to other, different Americans or Brits, but a just under half the time it went to someone from the European continent or Japan.
What happened to Gerwig and Alexander Payne (The Holdovers) happens every year, pretty much.
International contenders are undervalued at the DGA compared to the Academy. It’s a blind spot you can’t “fix” because the DGA just can’t ratchet up the invitation list, as it is a labor organization that somewhat incidentally operates an awards show. And as the Academy grows outward, it will grow away from the DGA, which by structural necessity is a domestic organization.
It just means that every year, one or two Americans get their hopes up after the DGA nominations come out, only to have them dashed by a far more global Oscars branch. Nothing untoward, just the way the cookie crumbles.
So, Greta Gerwig (and Alexander Payne!) were not snubbed because of sexism, it’s obvious they were snubbed because they were Americans. This is great, that should go over way better in this discourse.