Hollywood

The Golden Globes, the Oscars and Racism as a Weapon in Hollywood

A Golden Globes voter who spoke of racism inside the Hollywood Foreign Press Association asks why the Oscars' record on Arab, Muslim and Asian talent escapes the same scrutiny.

Husam Sam Asi 24 March 2021

Golden Globe Awards signs bearing the NBC and Hollywood Foreign Press Association names. — The Golden Globe Awards. Photo: Peter Dutton / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0.

In 2015 the #OscarsSoWhite campaign erupted, and it flared again the following year when Black actors were missing from the Oscar acting nominations for the second year running. Its organisers accused the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of racism. The Academy responded by raising the share of its members from under-represented ethnic and racial groups from 10 to 19 per cent and by introducing reforms that led to a marked rise in the number of nominees of colour in the years that followed.

This year the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes, faced similar accusations when some Black films and television programmes were missing from its nominations, and above all after the Los Angeles Times revealed that there was no Black journalist among its 87 members. The accusations sharpened when a speech I gave at one of the association’s monthly meetings was leaked. In it I said that, as a member, I had faced more racism inside the association than anywhere else.

In truth, the racism I have faced as a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association differs little from the racism I have faced elsewhere, and that many Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians face in the diaspora: being called a terrorist, an antisemite, a misogynist, a religious extremist, an angry Arab. The Americans who vote for the Oscars, and the Europeans who make up most of the Golden Globe voters, formed their view of ethnic and religious minorities by watching Hollywood films and Western media, which have presented people of colour as villains without morals, criminals devoid of humanity, rapists, drug dealers and extremist terrorists. Racism, then, is a pandemic that has spread through every area of life. No single institution or organisation has a monopoly on the disease.

Yet some in the West, journalists and politicians in particular, have begun to use racism as a weapon for settling scores with their opponents. None of the journalists who called me for a comment was interested in racism outside the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and I soon realised that their aim was to destroy the Golden Globes, which are voted on by foreign journalists who are not American. It seemed clear to me that they were using the fight against racism to justify their hostility to foreigners.

The Oscars’ own record

The hypocrisy of the American press was on full display when the latest Oscar nominations were announced. They were described as the most diverse in Oscar history, and as historic for nominating two women for best director, the British film-maker Emerald Fennell and the Chinese film-maker Chloé Zhao. Yet the same list dropped the Black director Regina King, who had been nominated for the Golden Globe for best director, and included a white director, the Dane Thomas Vinterberg. Black women directors remain shut out of the Oscar nominations for best director.

King is the second Black woman to be nominated for the Golden Globe for best director. Ava DuVernay came before her in 2015, nominated for Selma, and was left out of the Oscar nominations in the same category, which that year consisted entirely of men. Even so, both DuVernay and King joined the public criticism of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in recent weeks.

The American press also praised the ethnic diversity of the Oscar nominations for best actor, which for the first time included a Muslim, the British actor Riz Ahmed. The Golden Globe nominations had included a second Muslim in that category, the French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim. In the Oscar nominations his place went to the Korean-American actor Steven Yeun for Minari, which received six Oscar nominations, while The Mauritanian received none. It is the first film to tell the story of the United States’ war on terror from a Muslim’s point of view with a Muslim actor in the lead.

Riz Ahmed wearing a grey suit and tie on the red carpet. — Riz Ahmed. Photo: Red Carpet Report on Mingle Media TV / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council took a different view from the American media. It praised the Golden Globe nominations, which included three Muslim actors, Rahim, Ahmed and Ramy Youssef, and gave two nominations to The Mauritanian. Its president, Salam Al-Marayati, wrote that by overlooking the film the Academy had missed an opportunity.

There is an irony here. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, the story of an American sniper credited with more than 160 kills in Iraq, received six Oscar nominations. After its release the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee reported hundreds of violent messages aimed at Arabs and Muslims from people who had seen it. Golden Globe voters, for their part, regarded the film as racist and hostile to Muslims and gave it no nomination at all, which angered the American media. They called the voters America-haters with no taste in cinema.

What the Globes saw first

No Arab film has yet won an Oscar. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film to the Palestinian film Paradise Now in 2006. Rami Malek, the only Arab actor to have won an Oscar, for the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, won it only after first taking the Golden Globe in the same category. Before him Omar Sharif was honoured with three Golden Globes, for Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and Doctor Zhivago in 1965, and in 2020 Ramy Youssef won the award for best actor in a television comedy for Ramy, the first Muslim American series.

The Golden Globes were also ahead of the Television Academy in honouring Arab talent and drawing attention to its work. In January 2016 the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave the Golden Globe for best drama series to Mr. Robot, created by the Egyptian-American Sam Esmail, and nominated its star, Rami Malek, for best actor in a drama series. The Emmy nominations for the series followed later that year. Ramy, likewise, received its Emmy nominations only after Youssef had won his Golden Globe.

Asian talent has also fared better at the Golden Globes than at the Oscars. In 2019 and 2020 the Asian-American films Crazy Rich Asians and The Farewell each received two Golden Globe nominations, and Awkwafina, the star of The Farewell, won the award for best actress in a comedy. Neither film received a single Oscar nomination, and no Asian actress has yet won the Oscar for best actress.

European racism, American racism

Does that mean the European voters of the Golden Globes are less racist than the American voters of the Oscars and the Emmys?

Of course not. European racism is sometimes more dangerous than American racism. The American’s racism springs from ignorance of what happens outside the United States. The European’s springs from pride and arrogance inherited from ancestors who colonised the lands of people of colour until recent times. A YouGov survey in 2020 found that half of the Dutch and about a third of Britons regard their former empire as something to be proud of, the empire that exploited those peoples, seized their land and plundered their wealth.

Even so, Europeans strongly condemn the wars of the United States, its foreign policy and the racism of its system towards Black people. They often take to the streets against its government, as they did last summer after the police killing of George Floyd, against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and against the war on Iraq in 2003.

The irony is that it was European companies that seized African families in the 17th century and shipped them across the Atlantic to the Americas, where they were sold to Americans. Most of the modern wars in which the United States has become entangled are also the result of European colonial policies, which left behind a world divided into poor, weak statelets under corrupt dictatorships, still locked in bloody conflicts with one another.

That is why Europeans know far more about the political injustice and human catastrophes in their former colonies, in the Middle East, Africa or Asia. They feel some responsibility, and sometimes guilt, and so they launch initiatives to support artistic, economic and cultural projects in those regions and to back their talent.

Most Americans, for their part, do not know where those countries are on the map, let alone understand what is happening in them or why, and hear of them only when their government goes to war there. American television channels ignore events outside the United States in their news bulletins and concentrate on domestic news. When the United States was attacked on 11 September 2001, Americans were shocked and began to ask what they had done to deserve it, because their television programmes, their films and their leaders had led them to believe that they were a force for good in the world and that everyone loved them. Europeans were not surprised. It was as if they had been expecting the attacks, because they were aware of the anger of the peoples of the Third World towards the West.

The difference between Americans and Europeans in their view of the world’s peoples of colour also shows in how they judge films about those peoples. Americans regard the American sniper as a hero who fought terrorism in Iraq; Europeans condemn him as a criminal who took part in an illegal war. The Europeans’ motive, however, has little to do with love of Iraqis, Arabs or Muslims. They wish to present themselves as morally and intellectually superior to their American cousins.

What Hollywood stands to lose

That is why the European members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association were shocked and alarmed when American associations and institutions began to accuse them of racism and to demand more ethnic diversity among them, even though those bodies lack ethnic diversity themselves. The publicity firms that represent all of Hollywood’s stars, for example, boycotted the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to force it to admit Black members, although there is only one Black publicist in all those firms, and there are no foreign Black journalists in Hollywood who qualify to join the association.

Hollywood has given the Hollywood Foreign Press Association until the beginning of May to make changes that strengthen diversity. If the association fails, the Golden Globes will be scrapped. If that happens, they will be replaced by an American body that will most likely honour work in line with the American view of the world, and the chances of talent of colour being nominated for Hollywood awards, or winning them, will shrink.