Current Events > Stephen King under fire for 'not considering diversity in art, only quality'

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/14/stephen-king-oscars-diversity-criticism

Doesnt he have a point though? If you are considering anything besides the art then doesnt it pretty much just make it some sort of participation/patronising nomination

that said i agree with what joaquin said about it all just being another event to make more money lol

I'm all for diversity, but his critics are just making themselves look really stupid with that strawman.

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Writing books doesn't have a Rooney Rule smh

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People of color have been making high quality art this whole time, it doesn't help when they're judged more harshly or even ignored entirely.

What a world when someone is shit on for common sense.

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Those comments aren't racist.

But I feel like King is a little racist.

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I'm sure he doesn't give a fuck

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He said that he doesnt look at who did it, only what they have done

What the fuck are they getting mad about?

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Just like the Golden Globes, they aren't going to nominate a woman just because they need a woman. There are a limited number of nominations. Greta Gerwig could not take the place of any of those nominated. It's what it is. This was a much better year for films than 2018. It's a crowded field.

People who want forced diversity in an award show instead of the best talent are idiots. The Oscar's will bend next year though I'm sure.

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Harold Bloom would find this pretty amusing.

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This false dichotomy is ridiculous. Diversity and quality aren't polar opposites. It gets old to see the same stories from the same perspective over and over and that starts to affect quality. It gets old that any art with prominent diversity is assumed to be bad and assumed to be made for brownie points. It gets old that there's a very narrow kind of story that is recognized as having merit, and things outside of that are essentially considered stunts.

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Are we at the point now of stating that good artists should have thought about diversity decades ago and that the ones who didn't shouldn't be held in high regard? Or are they only tackling his recent works?

I mean, sure, you can watch an old movie with 7 white guys, 2 white women, and 1 black guy and play that game where you try and figure out who would be black, Latini, female, or LGBTQ if the film were made today. But that's not the same as saying, "You assholes of yesterday should've known better."

People tend not to step beyond their front porch unless someone points out to them that there's more out there. Even a lot of movies made in the past 10 years or so were lacking in diversity or equal gender representation. Don't pat yourself on the back and pretend that good people will instinctively include as many others as possible. That's not how that works. Some things, even if they're the right thing, have to be encouraged before it becomes a new standard.

Also, the audience isn't the same as it always has been.

In decades past, a good portion of America was outright hostile toward the idea of inclusion. We didn't have segregation throughout the South because we celebrated diversity. We had it because we shunned and feared equality. That market held some sway right up until the late 1960s. And before the Civil Rights Movement, that market represented roughly half of the US market.

That's before Stephen King's time. But in his heyday, having one black person in the cast meant you weren't a racist. This was before tokenism was called out for what it was.

Do I think Stephen King himself was or is a racist? No. Do I think he could have benefited from having more friends and more influences from people outside of his white small town Maine home base? Absolutely.

But you can't change the past. You can't go back to 1973 and have Stephen King set up a writer's studio with a black lesbian coauthor and have a preface stating that his novels were collaborations from several individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds. For the most part, that's now how things worked back then.

Just so I can better understand the argument. Are they saying they want something akin to affirmative action for award categories? Not like you pick someone because they are a underrepresented, but you take that into account to try to select someone underrepresented when it's a close call. I'm just trying to understand the frame of the argument. I don't want to comment on anything before that.

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I agree with King.

That being said, let's not even try to pretend the Oscars are in any way related to quality.

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I'm really getting sick of these f'n websites that you all post on here. I should be able to just click and read, not see some fucking donation tab and them telling me to turn off my ad block. Fuck that noise

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Stephen King is a racist who fills his books with the N word. Not a surprise he's anti-diversity.

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i don't understand their point. they want him to nominate more diversely so that minority groups can have more representation, not for their merits, but for diversity's sake?

why even call them awards then, might as well change the name to 'the participations' or something

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bnui_ransder posted...

He said that he doesnt look at who did it, only what they have done

What the fuck are they getting mad about?

These people don't believe pure merit exists as a concept, so all evaluations must inherently consider race to achieve equity. Equality need not apply.

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Quotas, de facto or de jure, don't care about the individual or the individual's works.
You are reduced to an array checkboxes of arbitrary traits, to be filled in. Little more.

Award show nominations are a symptom of a problem. There will never be a diversity in nominations until there are more opportunities for diversity in actors, writers, directors, etc. to tackle prestige roles. Which is something largely outside of the Academy's hands. The biggest step the Academy can do is add more diversity to their nominating members, because the idea of what makes prestige film does slant toward white or west-European significant stories.

Thankfully I do think there is more and more opportunity for diversity in the film industry today, more so than ever before, that said, greatness often takes time and experience so it takes awhile before it is reflected in award shows.

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He's not really "under fire."

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I feel like if you're actually putting the work into building your characters, world, and story then the diversity part should sort of shake out on its own. For example if your story takes place in the US but doesn't have any black people in it, then there needs to be some context that makes it apparent why this is the case. If it doesn't make sense to your readers, then you haven't written a quality story.

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Just make new categories.

Most diverse film
Best film with non-whites
Etc

Works about human beings with 0 diversity are objectively worse quality unless there is a reason for it. Its just bad world-building and the default needs to not be a white dude

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Bananana posted...

Its just bad world-building and the default needs to not be a white dude

If it's text, default is no traits, unless explicitly stated or strongly implied.

Bananana posted...

Works about human beings with 0 diversity are objectively worse quality unless there is a reason for it. Its just bad world-building and the default needs to not be a white dude

but wouldnt you expect there to be more movies about white dudes than others because theres more white dudes than any other race, I mean Im sure in Asia the default is an Asian dude etc....

I mean sure youd expect there to also be movies about other races but...there are? If we want to see more movies in the Oscars with other races then the people in those races have to make more great movies that are better than the ones with white dudes.

If there are hurdles to that we should deal with it but the answer isnt give them a condescending pat on the back when a more deserving movie gets excluded because it happened to be made by a white guy

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more like

a diversity of quality
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Dudes already one of the most progressive horror writers.
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