The Golden Globes just released the nominees for the 2018 awards. The event will air on January 7 on NBC and will be hosted by Seth Meyers. The nominee pool honors the best movies and TV shows of 2017. Many of our favorite television offerings like This Is Us, Big Little Lies, and Game of Thrones, obviously, got the recognition they deserved. Issa Rae was even nominated for best actress in a comedy or musical television show for HBO’s Insecure. The movie categories were less exciting. I was pleasantly surprised that Mary J. Blige received a nomination for her role as Florence in Netflix’s Mudbound, and if my 7-year-old niece has anything to do with it, Coco will take home the win for best animated film. But I think Jordan Peele, the genius behind February’s thriller Get Out, was robbed.
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Although we’ve known about it for a month now, I still don’t like that Get Out was submitted for Golden Globe consideration in the comedy category. While there were certainly moments of comic relief thanks to hilarity of Lil Rel Howery as Rob, it was a chilling thriller, through and through. I would even venture so far as to say that it was not a satire on race relations in the United States. It was more of an allegory. Pretending that it is anything else makes light of the way white supremacy, the commodification of Black bodies, and the disregard for Black life are critiqued in the movie. Peele himself tweeted in response to Get Out’s Golden Globe category that the film was “a documentary.”
While I’m salty that it won’t be competing with the big dogs in the drama category, I can accept it. However, there is absolutely no excuse for Peele not being nominated for best director or best screenplay. Neither of these categories are limited by genre, and Get Out should absolutely be recognized in them both. No matter which side of the horror-comedy debate you fall on, there is no denying that Get Out was a damn good movie. Daniel Kaluuya’s chair scene alone is better than most of the movies I’ve seen this year. (Kaluuya was rightfully nominated for best actor in a comedy or musical movie as a result of this effort.) The film completely redefined the horror genre and the way people of color are typically represented within it. But most importantly, it created a fresh opportunity to talk about the unsettling realities of race in a way that was both accessible and honest. This is a snub that stings in more ways than one.
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The fatal flaw of white supremacy in America is the lack of self-accountability. We live in a moment where being called racist is perceived as an affront on equal footing with the racism people of color experiences. Acknowledging how some white people are still trash is a conversation that makes people really uncomfortable. Many have concluded that Universal Studios submitted Get Out in the comedy category so that it would have a stronger chance of taking home a win. This makes sense to me, but I hate that they had to do it in the first place. Our culture — including Hollywood, which often aims to reflect that culture back at its participants — isn’t ready to accept how scary racism still is.