Compass World: This is Our Home, But It’s Foreign To You
The new A24 film “Minari” has sparked a conversation about what it means to be American. (PBS Creative Commons)
Monica Yi stares into an empty rural Arkansas field and asks, “What is this place?”
Her husband Jacob Yi responds, “Our new home.” This opening dialogue of the new A24 film Minari frames the discussion about belonging and identification that has followed the film’s release.
Public outcry and anger swelled when news broke that Minari was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Golden Globes this past Sunday, excluding it from being considered for Best Film. While the film took home the trophy, a bitterness still lingered.
The film details the trials and tribulations that members of a Korean-American family face as they search for their American Dream on an Arkansas farm. The designation that this film was “foreign” despite being set in the U.S., written and directed by Colorado-born Lee Isaac Chung, narrating a story about an American family pursuing the American Dream sparked a national conversation about what constitutes “foreign”—clearly, it is not a matter of citizenship.
“Go Back to Your Country”
The Best Film category has eligibility rules stating in order to contend in the category, more than half of the film’s dialogue must be in English. Minari was narrated mostly in Korean.
As disappointing as this decision by the Golden Globes was for many, it was also entirely unsurprising. Last year, Lulu Wang’s movie The Farewell, despite being produced, written, directed, and acted by Americans, was placed in the Foreign Language Film category, because most of the dialogue was in Mandarin.
What does foreign really mean in the context of the U.S.? According to census data, 20 percent of Americans over the age of 5 speak a language other than English in their homes. Not being uniform in our American experience is part of the American heritage.
Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim tweets against the decision to consider “Manari” as a foreign language film. (Twitter, Daniel Dae Kim)
Actor Daniel Dae Kim put it best: it is “the film equivalent of being told to go back to your country when that country is actually America.” There is an implicit assumption that there is a certain way to look and to speak that makes you truly American.
The archaic rule makes diverse stories that seek to challenge the status quo of U.S. film face a difficult choice, a choice that director Chung had to make: maintain original voice or give up part of the film’s authenticity and use an English narration to conform to mainstream notions of being American.
Minari challenges what it means to be American, but it also raises a second question. Who are these people that get to decide what is American and what is not?
Pressed About the Press
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is an extremely small and secretive group of international journalists that are the decision-makers behind the coveted Golden Globe awards (Flickr Commons)
Perhaps the biggest irony of this all is that these validators and gatekeepers of such an icon of American entertainment are a group of predominantly foreigners. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is the small, exclusive group that doles out the coveted Globe awards and hosts the Golden Globes annually, which is the third most-viewed awards show in the U.S.
The tax-exempt organization comprises 87 members, all international journalists representing various countries. Membership never exceeds 100. To get a sense of just how small this group is, the Oscars Academy has nearly 8,500 members, and even then, there are questions of how representative it is.
The HFPA keeps a tight lid on who its members are. From what has been publicly squeezed out, there are no Black members. Additionally, while some members write for well-respected foreign media outlets, others are freelancers writing for obscure overseas publications. There are even others that do not seem to be associated with a publication at all. Russian member Alexander Nevsky, for example, is a bodybuilder that once starred in a couple of low-budget action films. He counts for one vote out of 87.
There’s no expiration date for membership, meaning the average age of the HFPA is old. The only requirements to stay a member? Write six articles each year. There have been complaints of members sleeping through screenings of films or skipping them altogether.
Being a part of HFPA is all about the perks. Members receive unmatched access to press conferences, special events, not to mention all-expenses-paid trips to international screenings and other “gifts” from various sponsors and studios vying for votes. Studios pay for the journalists’ five-star hotel stays, pricey wine, signed art, you name it, in exchange for the box office boost the award show brings.
Member journalists often block the induction of new journalists into the organization, viewing them as threats to their turf. Any journalist seeking to join must be sponsored by two members, associated with a Southern Californian-based publication, and must submit a selection of four articles. However, any member of the association is able to veto a newcomer’s application.
And they have. In 2019, the HFPA blocked all five new applications, despite all of them meeting the qualifications for membership.
This structure allows the association to monopolize entertainment press access internationally. Norweigian-based Kjersti Flaa, one of the five journalists barred from entrance, has filed a lawsuit against the HFPA claiming “bullying” and negative smear campaigns were used against her. She claims her membership was vetoed because her publication presented competition against another Scandinavian member’s coverage.
Flaa’s case was dismissed by the judge on grounds that Flaa did not suffer any economic or professional hardships resulting from her exclusion.
Parasitic Money and Power
Under this comparison, the Academy that decides the Oscars seems worlds better. At least its awards are decided by democratic votes cast by its members that are composed of actors, producers, costume designers, and film-making professionals in 17 different branches. But it's corrupt in a different way.
The year is 1999. The Oscars Best Picture contenders for that year were the no-nonsense Saving Private Ryan, the hauntingly tragic Holocaust story Life is Beautiful, and the light-hearted rom-com Shakespeare in Love. The heavily-slated favorite for the category was Steven Spielberg's newest project Saving Private Ryan..
To everyone’s surprise, except maybe the producers’, Shakespeare in Love won the honor. It was later revealed this was all thanks to now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, who led a blitzkrieg of media and press advertisement that overspent all its contenders in the category many times over. Weinstein started a smear campaign against Saving Private Ryan, pushing the narrative that “it was all in the first 15 minutes.”
While Weinstein has long been ousted from his studio, this apparatus of aggressive and expensive campaigning stuck; you can buy these awards. In addition to the lack of minority representation in these award show organizations, the process is dirty and political.
To quote Bong Joon Ho, director of Parasite, the first foreign-language film to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture, the film industry needs to “overcome the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles” to see the deeply universal (and in this case, American) stories being told just beyond them. So authentically American in fact, they demand to be told in a “foreign” language.
This all needs to begin with critics that are driven not by money, but the ability to relate to the diverse shapes and colors America comes in. And if the structures of these organizations do not change, then perhaps it is time to see these awards show for what they really are: entertainment.