The Academy may imagine it is natural for Americans and British to own the English language. Eventually, however, demography and globalization will render that position untenable.
Business
Standard : The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences --
you know, the guys who hand out the Oscars
-- have decided to disqualify Nigeria’s first-ever official entry
for the international feature film category. “Lionheart,” from
Nigerian actress-director Genevieve Nnaji, was rejected because,
according to the Academy, the film “includes only 11 minutes of
non-English dialogue.”
The
decision is in accordance with the rules, which require that foreign
films be predominantly in languages other than English. But it has
exposed the Academy’s quite comically America-centric view of the
world, which is increasingly tone-deaf.
Surely
the point of recognizing international feature films separately is
because it would not make sense to put them in the same category as
movies made by American (or British) producers for the home market of
the Academy juries. Nigeria has Africa’s largest film industry;
about half its population speaks English. It is, in fact, Nigeria’s
official language, as it is one of India’s. Is it the Academy’s
belief that a film made in Nigeria for Nigerians doesn’t qualify as
international merely because the actors use a language Americans also
speak?
This
is a problem that goes beyond the Academy. England might perhaps be
surprised to discover that it doesn’t have the second- or even the
third-largest number of speakers of the language that bears its name.
India,
the Philippines, Nigeria and Pakistan are all home to comparably
larger numbers of English speakers. Yes, many of those people speak
additional languages and English is not their “first” language.
But, even for them, English is often the language of aspiration, the
language of cross-cultural communication, the language of the city.
Restricting
their national cultural production entirely to their “first”
language would be absurdly limiting. English is not an American or
British language. It is the language of millions of us elsewhere who
use it unselfconsciously to produce work that is entirely
“international” as far as the U.S. is concerned.
