cc: @iokheaira
Honestly, if the discourse were that simple-minded, I would be totally fine and unconcerned. It’s one thing to have one’s opinion of a film tossed aside because you’re (apparently) just doing it for the social justice cred. Social justice, at least, is a good cause. If someone’s really going to say anyone who likes Black Panther is only biased because they believe in social justice, then at least they’re mostly demonstrating a profound ignorance of film theory and what it even means for a film to be significant. A major reason why I think Black Panther deserves a Best Picture nomination is indeed social justice related. It is deserving because it locked into the zeitgeist, and reflects something important about black culture right now. See also Sorry to Bother You. See also Spider Verse, and BlackkKlansman, and Blindspotting.
What concerns me increasingly about the way online fan discourse runs is the same thing that concerns me about online discourse in general. About political discourse, about everything. Right now, it’s not about creating an excuse for why it is someone else might care for X film; it’s about creating a reason why anyone who cares for X film is OBJECTIVELY wrong. It’s about denying the very possibility that someone might think differently than you about a subject for a justifiable reason, and tearing down any system in place that allows for someone to think differently than you--because if facts disagree with you, then facts can be wrong.Â
One of the comments in the selection I provided (and you’ll see this reflected a lot) is that Black Panther simply isn’t as deserving of a nomination as Logan or Wonder Woman or Infinity War. And to be clear, you can definitely feel that way, and be genuine in that feeling. There’s nothing wrong with that. I do not personally agree, and Metacritic scores Black Panther higher than all those films by a pretty reasonable percentage, but whatever. (Facts, after all, can apparently be wrong; so can I.) There’s a specificity about the Black Panther criticism though that, to me, does not seem to come from collective good faith concern that the Best Picture name is being somehow devalued. Hell, this is a year that also sees Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book being nominated for Best Picture. I don’t see nearly as much hand-wringing over those from these same fans. It’s still just Black Panther, again the highest marked film of those three, and again the most well liked in a category that has always made room for big zeitgeist hits.Â
With all this in mind, it seems instead, to me, that this argument that Black Panther is not deserving or not a great film because x, y, z is because one cannot be biased if one is simply talking about “objective quality”. (As if a film can be boiled down to an objective quality simply and as if just anyone has the right to say whether a film is “objectively” good or bad.) One can only be justified if one is talking about objective quality--and justification based only on feeling, based in fact on rejecting all known objective markers of evaluation, is very much one of the major reasons why we’re politically and environmentally in the shit right now.
