When the Golden Globe nominations came down from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, there were plenty of snubs to note: Zendaya for Malcolm & Marie, any mention of Da 5 Bloods. But one that seemed extra glaring was the dismissal of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. No Yuh-jung Youn. No Steven Yeun. No Lee Isaac Chung. The film’s singular nomination was frustratingly in the Foreign Language category. Unfortunately, films nominated in the Foreign Language category are not eligible for Best Picture consideration.
According to the Golden Globes’ most recently revised rules, the HFPA states:
Motion pictures that qualify for the Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language award also qualify for awards in all other motion picture categories except Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, which are exclusively for English language motion pictures, and Best Motion Picture – Animated.
And I guess the question following that rundown is: why? Last year wasn’t the first, but perhaps the most glaring, instance of the rules prohibiting an awards-season frontrunner from competing in what is generally accepted as the night’s biggest category. Best Picture is what caps the night—the final award of the evening, suggesting a particular hierarchy. After sweeping awards season, Parasite went on to win the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. No nomination in the Best Picture category. Weeks later, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. If Parasite‘s exclusion wasn’t enough, the U.S. produced The Farwell was also listed in the category, similarly barred from Best Picture consideration.
In 1987, the category was changed from Best Foreign Film to Best Foreign Language Film, which is where the line in the sand was drawn. Anything with less than 50 percent English dialogue is relegated to the Foreign Language category. But the irony of that is that in last year’s race, 1917 (a film directed by a foreign director, starring foreign actors, set in a foreign location) was awarded Best Picture, while The Farewell (a film directed by an American director, starring an American actress, about largely American issues) was excluded.
And that’s not to say that Best Picture should go to an American film, nor should it be decided by some nationalist idea, but the 1987 change from Foreign Film to Foreign Language Film is more restrictive than its predecessor. It implies that so long as you’re willing to speak English, you can be deemed worthy of playing with the big boys. The HFPA uses Anglo-Saxon qualifiers to decide what is inherently American, when the idealized notion of America is that it decides for itself what is American. Despite last year’s discrepancy with the rest of the award circuit, the HFPA remained steadfast in its stance: Best Picture is English.
But its rules are at odds with its mission:
To establish favorable relations and cultural ties between foreign countries and the United States of America by the dissemination of information concerning the American culture and traditions as depicted in motion pictures and television through news media in various foreign countries.
That brings us back to Chung’s Minari. The film is one of the most undeniably American tales in this year’s crop. Following an immigrant family from South Korea that has recently landed in the center of America, the movie is about the hard truths hiding behind the American Dream. It conjures the ideals of working hard, farming, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and I can’t help but think that had Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams been attached to it, draped it in some good ol’ American Midwest accents, it might have been successful in its bid for Best Picture. Why? Because it is written in “American language.” That’s what we’re getting at, right? To be American—to be worthy—you must abandon the pieces of yourself that define you, including the language native to you.
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The irony of it all is in the name: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Despite the tenets of its founding in 1943, “Unity Without Discrimination of Religion or Race,” it’s like this group of 87 journalists, attached to often-obscure publications, cannot manage to cross that subtitle barrier to make good on its own promise. Hell, it was even found to be paying members $3,465 just to watch foreign language films.
Much like the story within Minari, you must ingratiate yourself in the community, turn a blind eye to the offhand comments about your appearance and your language, and smile about it all the while. You must create something remarkable to be average. And in the case of the Globes, remarkable remains separate. The Golden Globes, much like the American Dream, is for a fraction, not the whole.
For now, Minari joins the long list of Golden Globe Best Picture nominees that could have been, had the organization’s rules reflected its mission. But in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, Minari wasn’t excluded from Best Picture because of a snub. It was excluded because there are rules in place that ensured it was never considered to begin with.
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