For Your Consideration: Why Christians Should Care About the Academy Awards

Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of columns on faith and film from Sean Palmer, leading up to the Oscars ceremony on March 15.

With shaking hands and jittering feet, she sat there, worried. Like every other potential victor, she harbored hope but didn’t want to hope too much. 

She wanted to win, but her mind kept reminding her, “Something like this has never happened before. Something like this will never happen. Not with these people. Not in this place.”

After all, all the other nominees were seated where they should have been—down front, with a loved one, alongside other nominees. But not Hattie McDaniel.

Hattie, nominated for the role of “Mammy” in Gone With the Wind, sat separately, segregated from the rest of the celebration at the 12th Annual Academy Awards in 1940. She was just as nervous and hopeful as the other nominees, but she got to be nervous alone. Or, at least, that’s how I imagine the night was for Hattie McDaniel.

Yet, at the end of the evening, she did what no Black actor had ever done. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Most people don’t remember Hattie McDaniel or the fact that she was the first African American to win an Oscar. After all, Gone With the Wind romanticized slavery, and McDaniel’s “Mammy” is considered one of the most grossly stereotypical portrayals of Black people ever put on film. HBO pulled the film from its rotation and refused to re-air it.

But those who do recall McDaniel’s win in 1940 largely do so because of George Clooney’s speech at the Oscars after he won best supporting actor in 2006. Responding to criticism that the Academy was out of touch, he reminded viewers of McDaniel’s win. 

He suggested that the film industry was ahead of America on equality and civil rights. The Oscars, according to Clooney, are not out of touch; they are ahead of the curve.

Conversation and Cultural Liturgy 

That’s the interesting thing about the Oscars—and maybe why Christians might want to pay some attention to the show. Oscar and Hollywood critics accuse the ceremony of being a cabal of wealthy elites giving each other awards. But it’s actually much more than that.

The Oscars are about more than the films and artisans who make them. They are America talking to itself about itself: Why are these stories so crucial at this moment? Where is the Spirit leading or what is the Spirit warning?

For those paying attention—and for cinephiles like me—the Academy Awards are, in their own way, a kind of secular liturgy. Once a year, the industry gathers to bless certain films as canonical. Those blessings tell us what the Academy thinks is serious, which stories are “important,” which aesthetics count as prestige, and which identities are allowed complexity.

Best picture nominees that directly address politics and social crises function like parables of the cultural moment. Films such as Argo, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Dr. Strangelove, All the President’s Men, Judas and the Black Messiah, and The Insider became reference points not only because they were well made, but because they dramatized live questions about war, race, media and state power.

This year, the film It Was Just an Accident has been nominated for two Oscars—best international feature film and best original screenplay. Many commentators are predicting it will win one or both of these awards, but it doesn’t matter how good or bad the film is.

Its filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, is—and has long been—an Iranian dissident. He has been imprisoned before and currently faces imprisonment should he return to Iran. It Was Just an Accident was filmed in secret. 

The reason so many Hollywood pundits are placing their chips on it is that they know and believe his story. They are convinced that what continues to go on in Iran must be highlighted.

Christians might want to pay attention to the Oscars because they are a cultural text. Celebrated stories shape how a culture believes, thinks and functions.

Last year’s best picture winner, Anora, was a commentary on sex work and the gig economy. These are places our friends and neighbors—whom we are called to love—find themselves.

Plus, as with Hattie McDaniel and other films through the years like In the Heat of the Night, Hollywood can often shed light on structural sins we may overlook in the day-to-day business of our lives. There are stories of suffering and marginalized people here and our duty is to respond with justice and freedom.

Movies aren’t always just movies. Sometimes they can be marching orders.