Surprise: Golden Globes Nominations Show How Hollywood Rewards Mediocrity

Emily in Paris is a fine show: light, fluffy, and watchable in the way that the American fantasy of jetting off to Paris and donning less-is-more "French girl" makeup always is. In fact, the Darren Star production is so solidly fine that it prompted writer Kyle Chayka to herald the dawn of a new genre of television in the New Yorker: “ambient TV,” referring to content that doesn’t require our engagement, but serves as a “a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption.” It’s not bad, but it’s a background watch. 

Still, the show and starring actor Lily Collins got our full attention this week when they were nominated in two categories at this year’s Golden Globes: Best Television Series—Musical or Comedy, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series—Musical or Comedy. Even some of the people behind the show were taken aback: “It never occurred to me that our show would be nominated,” Deborah Copaken, a writer for the show, explained in The Guardian yesterday.

As always, this year’s nominations included glaring omissions and missteps. Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, a poignant film about a Korean family trying to establish a farm and a life in rural Arkansas in the 1980s, got a nod in just one category—and the wrong one, according to many social media critics. Despite being an American movie made by A24, focused on a family living in Arkansas, the film received its nomination in the Foreign Language category, echoing last year’s situation with The Farewell. 

The absence of Black-led movies like Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Judas and the Black Messiah among the best drama nominees made for some of the Golden Globes’ biggest snubs, according to the New York Times (alongside a lack of Meryl Streep). But the omission that prompted the most outrage across the internet was undoubtedly Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, the acclaimed HBO series which centered her vision as the show's creator, director, writer, and star, and was widely celebrated by critics for its raw and nuanced depiction of sexual assault, power and consent, and millennial life. In her Guardian piece, which argues that Coel deserved a Golden Globe nomination, Copaken recalled her response to the show: “‘That show,’ I told everyone who would listen, ‘deserves to win all the awards.’”

The fact that Emily in Paris—a show that is, again, decidedly just fine—enters the running for two awards, while I May Destroy You—which cemented Coel's status as one of the most multi-talented young auteurs in the business and clearly takes a much more creative and one-of-a-kind approach to storytelling—gets no recognition highlights a paradox that Black creators and other creators of color continue to face in the entertainment industry and beyond. Why do white creators get to make mediocre work and get more opportunities, even awards, while everyone else has to work twice, thrice, four times as hard just to be in the running? The idea of the auteur certainly crosses race lines, but the burden of perfection clearly weighs more heavily on some creators than others.

One side effect of this asymmetry is that projects that are seen as “representative” carry a lot more weight. As the Gold Open campaign around Crazy Rich Asians—which bought out theaters for screenings of the film—made clear, the communities being “represented” can also feel pressure to rally behind these projects, so that Hollywood will see the value in producing more “representative” stories. The downside to this is that people in a community will feel an onus to support projects they don’t necessarily agree with—CRA certainly doesn’t speak to most Asian Americans’ reality, just as Disney’s 2020 Mulan, which also got Gold Open backing, was full of problems. And the fruit of these campaigns can be too precise (See: the obvious CRA ripoffs of HBO’s House of Ho and Netflix’s Bling Empire). Then, when the projects are criticized, supporters can be disappointed that Hollywood and the media are undermining diverse creators and even the entire project of “representation.”

Simultaneously, it's all too easy for viewers from underrepresented communities to project huge expectations onto these productions. They expect more from the soapy reality TV of Netflix’s Bling Empire by virtue of its Asian cast than perhaps they should—even if we, as a society, seem to reflexively ask much less from non-Asian parallels like Selling Sunset or the Real Housewives. 

In short, there are so many examples of the white American experience on screen that it doesn’t matter if one is bad; a single production will never be tasked with standing in for the whole of white American experience, because that experience is one that Western media still deems to be universal. Something like Real Housewives isn’t expected to capture every facet of the average white person's experience in America; it can simply be petty, dramatic, and mediocre, because we expect other works to do the heavier lifting. That's because 91 percent of film studio chiefs are white and 82 percent are male, according to UCLA’s 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report, and the stories we see on screen reflect that. As a recent Atlantic interview with director Shaka King about Judas and the Black Messiah made clear, even a Black director making a movie with big stars, produced by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, can struggle to get funding. 

This year’s Golden Globe nominations are a reminder that despite some diversity initiatives, Hollywood continues to uphold the status quo, and mediocre work from the creators who make up the establishment continues to prevail. Instead of taking risks with new stories and experiences, studios and streaming services keep returning to the same abstracted but myopic vision of who the “American audience” is, and what it desires, leading to a constant cycle of reboots, franchises that never end, and mediocre new projects from creators with successful track records—Emily in Paris creator Darren Star, of course, is also the man behind Sex and the City. 

Opportunities for Black creators and other creators of color remain limited. When they happen, viewers impose unyielding standards of perfection on them. And even when they are near-perfect—as is the case of Minari and I May Destroy You—they still don’t get the recognition they deserve. It’s become more and more clear in recent years that these awards spawn constant discontent, and that their only real function is to celebrate the already-successful. So why are we still acting like they matter?