{"id":8246,"date":"2017-03-01T02:57:06","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T06:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=8246"},"modified":"2017-03-01T02:57:06","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T06:57:06","slug":"why-separating-art-from-the-artist-doesnt-work-at-award-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2017\/03\/01\/why-separating-art-from-the-artist-doesnt-work-at-award-shows\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Separating Art from the Artist Doesn’t Work at Award Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Relatively speaking, this year\u2019s Academy Awards were kind of great. La La Land<\/em> (which I liked, mind you) didn\u2019t sweep like I feared it would. Arrival<\/em> got a much-deserved sound editing award, Kenneth Lonergan won Best Original Screenplay, and most importantly, Moonlight<\/em> won Best Picture (along with a Best Adapted Screenplay win and Mahershala Ali\u2019s Best Supporting Actor win). It was the first year ever that my favorite movie of the year won Best Picture. Even most of the wins I didn\u2019t agree with I could grudgingly accept; I love Emma Stone in general, and I loved Damian Chazelle\u2019s work on Whiplash<\/em>, so I didn\u2019t mind their wins too much.<\/p>\n

But there was one category where I really couldn\u2019t figure out what I wanted to win and how I felt about the outcome: the Best Actor category.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I haven\u2019t seen Fences<\/em> or Hacksaw Ridge<\/em>. For all I know, if I\u2019d seen those, I\u2019d be rooting for Denzel Washington or Andrew Garfield (probably the former). But when I saw Manchester by the Sea<\/em>, Casey Affleck blew me away. If we\u2019re awarding the best performance of the year, I\u2019d say he deserves it (though I was personally pulling for Trevante Rhodes, who didn\u2019t even get nominated\u2014he\u2019d probably get classified as a \u2018supporting actor\u2019 anyway).<\/p>\n

The thing is, the situation is more complicated than that. Controversy has been swirling around Affleck for the past few months due to multiple allegations of sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

Normally, separating the art from the artist is fairly simple to me. I\u2019m easily able to enjoy pieces of art I enjoy that were created by terrible people; Orson Scott Card\u2019s views about homosexuality are pretty gross, for example, but Ender\u2019s Game<\/em> is one of my favorite books. I can love Annie Hall<\/em> without thinking about Woody Allen sexually abusing his daughter, and I can enjoy Mel Gibson\u2019s performances in Mad Max<\/em> and Lethal Weapon<\/em> without fixating on any number of the horrifying things he has said. I understand why people would draw the line with those cases, but I\u2019ve always had no problem overlooking behind-the-scenes happenings to appreciate the art itself.<\/p>\n

Of course, that doesn\u2019t mean that I necessarily support these artists continuing to have long, fruitful careers, free of serious consequences. Sure, I can enjoy Annie Hall<\/em> and Vicky Cristina Barcelona<\/em>, but I\u2019d have no problem with Woody Allen being blacklisted for the rest of his life (I guess it doesn\u2019t hurt that most of his more recent movies aren\u2019t great). Sure, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em> is one of my earliest favorite performances, and I continue to enjoy Christian Slater\u2019s work on Mr. Robot<\/em>, but their repeated acts of domestic violence should prevent them from finding work. And sure, Casey Affleck was amazing in Manchester by the Sea<\/em>, but he shouldn\u2019t have been offered the role in the first place. Besides, it\u2019s not like there\u2019s any shortage of talented actors in Hollywood. I\u2019m sure Matt Damon and Kenneth Lonergan could\u2019ve found other actors capable of matching Affleck\u2019s talent.<\/p>\n

My point is that I can sit back and enjoy these performances and works of art for what they are, but when it comes to the artists\u2019 careers, I support serious consequences. If you asked me to choose between Nate Parker having a long, fruitful career ahead of him and never making a movie again, I\u2019d kill his career. Same goes for Casey Affleck, or Woody Allen, or any of the countless actors with a history of sexual violence. (And, just to clarify, I don\u2019t mean to equate acts of sexual harassment with rape, but they are all lumped into the category of sexual violence\u2014and repeated perpetrators of any kind of sexual violence clearly deserve consequences for that.)<\/p>\n

And award shows like the Oscars complicate the whole dilemma. Because even if acting awards should<\/em> be based only on performance alone, that\u2019s not the case. There are so many other factors that go into who wins, and the outcomes of each competition carry unintended connotations outside the merit of the art.<\/p>\n

Because winning Best Actor doesn\u2019t just acknowledge that the performance was good; it acknowledges that the actor himself should be praised, that he should continue to receive more work and high-quality roles. Sure, awards recognition doesn\u2019t always<\/em> correlate with future success; the pattern of having a lackluster post-award career has been unofficially termed \u201cF. Murray Abraham Syndrome,\u201d<\/a> after F. Murray Abraham failed to follow up his Best Actor win for Amadeus<\/em> with many major roles.<\/p>\n

But winning an Oscar is generally a pretty big thing for your career. Aside from the obvious prestige that an Academy Award brings, Oscar wins also correlate<\/a> with higher box office revenue, higher DVD sales, higher paychecks later in your career, and higher visibility (many millions of people watching the award ceremony will do that). Jennifer Lawrence\u2019s insane success the past few years isn\u2019t entirely due to her 2012 Oscar win for Silver Linings Playbook<\/em>, but that certainly contributed. Lawrence has been the highest-paid actress in the world since 2015, and you don\u2019t get there just from starring in an (admittedly lucrative) young adult science fiction franchise.<\/p>\n

So when you win an Academy Award for Best Actor, you\u2019re probably looking at a very successful career ahead of you, especially if you\u2019re relatively young (Casey Affleck, at 41, definitely falls into that category, especially since roles for older men are much more widely available than roles for older women).<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, when a sex offender wins the Best Actor award, it implicitly sends the message to general audiences that you can get away with things like sexual assault and still be rewarded for it. When I see Casey Affleck win Best Actor, and when I see people like Mel Gibson, Woody Allen, and Donald fucking Trump continue to prosper despite the heinous things they\u2019ve said and done, I know that it\u2019s easy to get away with practically anything. If you\u2019re a white man, anyway; if anyone in the film industry was actually hurt by allegations of sexual assault, it was Nate Parker, and race was almost certainly a factor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Look, I\u2019m all for separating the art from the artist when it comes to evaluating the quality of the art. But it\u2019s different when our decisions actually affect the careers of the artists we\u2019re evaluating. It\u2019s not as simple as separating the art from the artist when rewarding the art actually rewards the artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relatively speaking, this year\u2019s Academy Awards were kind of great. La La Land (which I liked, mind you) didn\u2019t sweep like I feared it would. Arrival got a much-deserved sound editing award, Kenneth Lonergan won Best Original Screenplay, and most importantly, Moonlight won Best Picture (along with a Best Adapted Screenplay win and Mahershala Ali\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2178,"featured_media":8247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8248,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246\/revisions\/8248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}