The Secret Agent, the Kleber Mendonça Filho movie starring Wagner Moura, has won Best Motion Picture – Non English Language at the Golden Globe Awards. It’s a great achievement, and it comes on the heels of the movie winning the Critics Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film. But both these wins, which should have been a cause of celebration, have given us bittersweet moments that, sadly, feel very common for our communities.
Make no mistake, we are still celebrating. But while we do it, it’s important to point out the ways Latines are continuously being disrespected, and how much it hurts, particularly considering the current political climate.
At the Critics Choice Awards, the cast was ‘presented’ with the award on the red carpet, without any warning that it wouldn’t be presented during the ceremony or that they wouldn’t get a real chance to celebrate their win. Watching the moment back, it’s clear they didn’t even understand what was going on. And the way the award was presented, without fanfare and almost as an afterthought, means they didn’t even get to really do a speech, with Kleber Mendonça Filho and Wagner Moura taking a moment to say thank you as they presented later in the evening.
Then there’s the Golden Globes, when, after winning for Best Motion Picture — Non English Language, the director and the cast got on stage to give their speech. And we know awards shows like to keep it tight. They’ll start the music to drown you out if you’re taking “too long.” That’s exactly what happened to Kleber Mendonça Filho. The problem, of course, it’s that throughout the course of the ceremony, there had been other speeches that went even longer without the music cutting them off.
Check out how long Jessie Buckley spoke after winning the award for Best Original Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, or how long Rhea Seehorn got after winning for Pluribus. Paul Thomas Anderson also spoke for longer than Mendonça Filho after winning for One Battle After Another. They aren’t the only ones. And the problem isn’t that they got more time; they have earned it. But all nominees deserve to celebrate their win in the same way, and it says a lot that Kleber Mendonça Filho was really the only winner of the night who was interrupted by the music the way he was.
It’s especially striking in a year that saw 8 acting nominees from our communities and two movies directed by Latinos, but only one other win, for Wagner Moura, again for The Secret Agent. Our communities are diverse, they heavily influence Hollywood, and they’re participating in different shows and movies, both in front of and behind the camera. But recognition still feels far off. And if the Golden Globes prove something, it is that respect is also still far off.
The Secret Agent isn’t an outlier, either. This has happened in other years, other awards ceremonies, and has consistently happened to winners of our communities, in many different categories. And it really says a lot about what Hollywood considers important that it continues to happen to Non-English language movies, especially ones from Latin America.
