Oscars scandals through the years

Spike Lee’s 'Do The Right Thing' doesn’t get nominated for Best Picture

As long as awards have existed, there have been snubs. The biggest of them all was in 1990 when Spike Lee’s groundbreaking Do The Right Thing (1989) was not nominated for Best Picture. Instead that year, the Best Picture Oscar was won by another movie which also depicted race relations, but in a more benign and palatable way for white audiences — Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The snub was so egregious that Kim Basinger called it out from the Oscar stage while presenting another award that night saying, “We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: They tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s Do the Right Thing.” Lee, arguably one of the greatest living American filmmakers, is still waiting on that Best Picture statuette.

#OscarsSoWhite

Cut to 2015, when April Reign saw the all-White list of acting nominees and fired off a tweet with a three-word hashtag that shames the Academy to this date: #OscarsSoWhite. While this generated some controversy that year, it wasn’t until the following year when no nominees of colour were nominated in acting categories again that the hashtag came roaring back.

A week later at an emergency board meeting, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced a membership initiative that aimed to double the number of women and ethnically underrepresented members in four years. While the effects of that initiative have certainly been felt in the last few years, it’s still far from perfect — even this year, deserving movies like The Woman King and Till were completely shut out despite being favourites in multiple categories. As were Decision to Leave and Joyland in the Best International Feature Film category.

At the 2016 ceremony, host Chris Rock took some jabs at the Academy with #OscarsSoWhite, but he also made fun of some of the black film fraternity who had called for a boycott. Most notably, he joked that Jada Pinkett-Smith couldn’t really "boycott" the ceremony since she wasn’t invited in the first place. In hindsight, this joke was probably the first step towards The Slap.

'Moonlight'/'La La Land' Envelopegate

“There’s been a mistake. Moonlight — you guys won Best Picture.” With these words, La La Land (2016) producer Jordan Horowitz ended his brief but action-packed tenure as an Oscar winner. Ah, the glory days of 2017 when the most shocking thing that could happen on the Oscars stage was announcing the wrong winner for the biggest award of the night. How naive we were back then!

The Slap

There’s not much to say about The Slap that hasn’t already been said. Experts have dissected Chris Rock’s joke, Will Smith’s mental state, and the inner workings of the Pinkett-Smith marriage, in failed attempts to understand what happened. But one thing is clear — at every stage, the Academy’s response was too little, too late. In the words of Academy President Janet Yang, their response to the incident was "inadequate".
This year, the Academy has instituted a "crisis team" to handle any untoward events. It's difficult to imagine that the presence of a crisis team could have prevented The Slap, but they could at least act swiftly to address the fallout and manage the perception. And, in Hollywood, that’s all that matters. In the meantime, they’ve recruited Envelopegate survivor Jimmy Kimmel to be the "unflappable and unslappable" host of the 2023 Academy Awards.