Stephen King has published a new essay in The Washington Post. In it, he attempts to clarify the meaning behind some controversial tweets he sent out earlier in the month.
The famous horror novelist sits on the Academy Awards voting panel. Specifically, he looks at best picture, best adapted screenplay and best original screenplay.
King came under fire in mid-January after the nominees for this year’s awards were revealed. In what’s becoming of a yearly ritual, celebrities and pundits bemoaned the lack of diversity in this year’s Oscars field. Spoiler: it was very male and very white.
Watch: Natalie Portman – “Here are the all male nominees”
King took to Twitter to offer his two cents on the matter. “I would never consider diversity in matters of art,” he said. “Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”
It was an utterly baffling thing to say, especially given King’s reputation as liberal and progressive-minded. Now, in his new essay, King attempts to clean up the mess he made.
“For answers to why some talented artists are nominated and some — such as Greta Gerwig, who helmed the astoundingly good new version of Little Women — are not, you might need to look no further than the demographic makeup of those who vote for the Academy Awards,” he writes.
King points out that women account for 32% of Oscar voters, which is up a whopping 1% from last year. Minority members (presumably anyone who isn’t white) make up 16% of the total voting membership.
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“Not good enough,” writes King. “Not even within shouting distance of good enough.”
So what about those tweets, then?
In a nifty bit of revisionist history, King basically suggests there was a perfectly reasonable subtext to his tweets that everyone else simply ignored.
“As with justice, judgments of creative excellence should be blind,” he writes. “But that would be the case in a perfect world, one where the game isn’t rigged in favour of the white folks.”
He underlines his belief that creative excellence comes from every walk of life, and that excellence should be the only standard by which creative works are judged.
“We don’t live in that perfect world,” he concludes, “and this year’s less-than-diverse Academy Awards nominations once more prove it.”
