The Oscars will likely snub The Forty-Year-Old Version, a comedy about how Black female artists get snubbed
Film Features Version
Last year was an amazing year for Black female filmmakers. Before the pandemic hit, Stella Meghie’s love story The Photograph opened in theaters across the country. Not long after, Tayarisha Poe’s Selah And The Spades hit Amazon Prime, while Channing Godfrey Peoples’ Miss Juneteenth went out virtually. Maïmouna Doucouré raised a ruckus when her controversial coming-of-age tale, Cuties, dropped on Netflix, the same streaming service that gave us Gina Prince-Bythewood’s ass-kicking actioner The Old Guard. And Garrett Bradley directed one of the best documentaries of the year, Time. (It’s a shame we didn’t get Nia DaCosta’s much-anticipated Candyman reboot, which was slated for 2020 but is now scheduled to open this August.)
At the moment, all eyes are on Regina King, the Oscar-winning actor who made her directorial debut last year with One Night In Miami…, based on Kemp Powers’ play about what possibly transpired the night Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke all got together at a Miami hotel in 1964. King has already been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director, alongside fellow female nominees Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Women) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland). If she gets nominated for a Best Director Oscar, she would be the first Black female filmmaker to do so. In all likelihood, that will happen, and Oscar voters will pat themselves on the back for finally putting a sista (sorry, Ava!) on the ballot. But in a perfect world, more than one melanin-enhanced lady could get nominated in the same year–or at least be in contention for a nomination, especially when the year in question boasted so many strong films from Black women.
Besides Miami, all of the aforementioned movies (and their filmmakers) will probably be overlooked by the Academy, because their distributors aren’t running in-your-face, for-your-consideration campaigns, and because voters may be just too damn lazy to find and watch them on their own. Of the names not being tossed around this awards season, the most egregiously unmentioned might be Radha Blank. She’s the writer, director, and star of The Forty-Year-Old Version, which won the U.S. Dramatic Competition Directing Award at Sundance a year ago, before being acquired by Netflix. The film’s basically a satirical, loose-limbed version of her life story.
Shot on 35mm, black-and-white film, Version is a throwback to picturesque New York stories like Manhattan, from frequent Oscar nominee Woody Allen, or Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. (Blank notably served as a writer on the TV version of that film.) The multi-hyphenate plays a struggling playwright who was once considered a star on the rise, but is now stuck teaching theater to rowdy high school kids and trying to get one play off the ground and on the stage before she turns 40. Looking to fuel her creativity while also purging herself of her middle-aged frustrations, she creates a rap persona—RadhaMUSprime—and starts spitting bars about getting old and tired and admiring white boys’ asses.
Even though Blank has claimed Version is “about 65% me,” she’s had a long, unpredictable career, going from playwright to teacher to rapper to comedian to television writer to, finally, filmmaker. The movie’s an offbeat, on-point take on the hurdles and obstacles Black women like Blank endure when they just wanna create and speak from the gut. As much as she wants her Black-and-proud play, titled Harlem Ave., to be the next Hamilton, she finds herself having to water it down, making it as gentrified and whitewashed as the city itself.
Is it any wonder Blank wants to let her fortysomething freak flag fly—which includes hanging and flirting with a younger beatmaker (Brooklyn rapper Oswin Benjamin)—and become a rap goddess? The scenes where she’s in the presence of MCs doing their thing, whether they’re warming up backstage before a show or getting all heated during an all-female, battle-rap competition, have a down-and-dirty, documentary feel to them. Like the best New York movies, Blank gives you her own personalized portrait of the city, hitting various boroughs and revealing many of the gorgeous, grimy, and ghettorific things only real-ass New Yorkers know about.
Although Version was well-reviewed and was named one of 2020’s 10 best films by the National Board of Review, it hasn’t been hotly discussed among the online streaming crowd and, sadly, hasn’t garnered any awards buzz either. (It looks like the only way to get people to watch a black-and-white Netflix movie starring Black people is to make sure they’re arguing a lot.) You could say that Version, a movie about a Black woman trying to get her story told without condescending white gatekeepers screwing it up, has also had issues getting the thumbs-up from white gatekeepers. Maybe they aren’t fans of films that suggest they’re mostly the reason more Black projects don’t see the light of day.
Currently, Version is another film made by a Black woman that’s out there in the ether, hoping to end up on someone’s watchlist. It’s also a film that, much like the ones mentioned before, attempts to give viewers a unique, authentic, multilayered look at how a Black woman lives (and survives) today. One of these days, hopefully, a sista is gonna get an Oscar for that.
16 Comments
Fuck the Oscars.
Really wish Netflix would have put their For Your Consideration weight behind this instead of Mank, a movie so dull I gave up an hour in.
Netflix isn’t dumb. Movies about the power of movies/the greatness of Hollywood have to be completely terrible to lose. A movie about how shitty the movie-making world is? Hah.
Yeah it obviously makes more financial sense for Netflix spend money campaigning for Mank instead of FYOV, but I just wish we lived in a world where it didn’t.
question: did you know the history behind the movie (Mank) before watching it?i didn’t, and i found it quite confusing. and i also fell asleep twice.
I knew the broad strokes—I’ve seen Citizen Kane a couple of times and had read some reviews. Maybe one day I’ll go back and finish it, but nothing in the movie grabbed my attention.Which I was surprised by; Fincher movies are usually impeccably paced.
I PROMISE I’ll watch it this week, but for now I’ll second the recommendations for Selah And The Spades and Miss Juneteenth, if only to experience Lovie Simone’s and Nicole Beharie’s onscreen presence.
Because it’s about people being snubbed does that mean it was automatically “snubbed” if it simply doesn’t get nominated?? Was it supposed to be guaranteed a nomination because of its content??
Why ask dishonest questions more finely-manicured than a suburban lawn in the summertime rather than… not?
What the fuck does that even mean?
I think he was just letting you know you’re a dick.
It’s a legitimate question. How is it determined that something has been “snubbed” rather than “not nominated”? This same article is written every Oscar season about one movie or another. It’s offensive to ask that question?? Are you okay? Do you want to sit down?
I believe the premise of the article is, shockingly, that is also happens to deserve one.
Just because a movie or actor wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, it doesn’t mean they were “snubbed.” They just didn’t get nominated, for Christ’s sake! Let’s look at the definition of “snub,” shall we?snub: an act of showing disdain or a lack of cordiality by rebuffing or ignoring someone or something.Nine films will be nominated for Best Picture this year, out of 329 that were released. Some of the 320 were certainly very good, but that doesn’t mean they were “snubbed,” that the voters all decided to emphasize their utter disregard and mean-spirited disdain for them. THEY JUST DIDN’T GET NOMINATED. THERE WERE ONLY NINE SLOTS. The same goes for every other category. The word “snub” gets bandied about every year, in article after article, as if a film, writer, director, etc. the critic likes was singled out to be humiliated by the Academy, when in fact they simply didn’t receive a nomination. That’s what I’m saying. The critic liked a film and the Academy members likely won’t go for it. The critic is a human being, and so are the Academy members. All of them have the ability to like or not like something. Just because the critic says it’s great, it doesn’t mean its non-nomination was a “snub.” And I say this as somebody who wrote movie reviews for a major news service for seven years.I happen to think Ian Holm’s performance in “The Sweet Hereafter” is the single best film performance of the 1990’s, and I wrote a piece at the time saying I felt that way. It wouldn’t have occurred to me in a million years, though, to define his not being nominated as a “snub,” that voters were aiming to be a bunch of assholes by not nominating Ian Holm. I was shocked that he didn’t receive a nomination, but the film still exists and I feel the same way I always have about it. The whole thing is subjective, but people tend to think their personal opinions are hammered into marble on the side of a mountain. Ultimately, the Academy Awards don’t mean a damn thing. And not being nominated doesn’t mean a damn thing, either, as long as you’re connecting to people with your film or performance. That’s the goal, not a nomination by what amounts to a random cross section of human beings who you may or may not agree with.
“You could say that Version, a movie about a Black woman trying to get her story told without condescending white gatekeepers screwing it up, has also had issues getting the thumbs-up from white gatekeepers.”Can you explain this more, ie which gatekeepers are you talking about here? Because the movie is currently sitting at 98 % on Rotten Tomatoes, and 100 % among top critics. It’s also at 80 on Metacritic. The only gatekeeper to blame here is Netflix, who decided to push other movies for consideration. This kind of goes back to the Scorsese argument in a funny way – people automatically accuse these nameless/faceless gatekeepers of keeping interesting movies down, when for the most part film critics/film lovers who write about this stuff online are trying to get people to see these types of movies. The problems arise with the corporate conglomerates (Disney, Netflix) who somehow get off scot free. Yes, Netflix allowed this to be made, but Netflix’s algorithm makes it tough to find these types of movies which may not quite fit neatly in people’s preferences. Seriously, try finding this movie on Netflix – it’s NOWHERE. I scrolled through every category I could think of before searching the movie, and it’s tagged as “Hip Hop, Music and Musicals.” And then I went to that music category, and it’s like 10 rows down, and doesn’t even have a good picture. Netflix made this impossible to find.And that’s not even taking into account that the corporation wouldn’t back this movie by sending out screeners or pushing it, despite the incredible reviews. This is a gatekeeper problem, but it’s not the one I think you’re implying in that sentence.
It’s a thoroughly charming, if formulaic, movie that isn’t really Oscar material.