This year marked a spectacular boycott of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe awards, an astonishing fall from grace for tinsel town’s night of nights in as little as two years. Overall, the shine on awards season has greatly dimmed as a result of their failures to have diverse representation.Oyelowo, 45, was infamously overlooked for an Oscar nomination in 2014 for his flawless portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.In the years since, streaming services have expanded significantly, brimming with an array of multicultural content, which Oyelowo believes has opened people’s eyes to the breadth of work that’s long been overlooked – until now.“Streaming has completely changed the landscape in terms of what we now know audiences are actually gravitating towards,” Oyelowo told news.com.au.“I think that pre-2014, we didn’t have Netflix in over 200 million homes. We didn’t have Amazon, Apple and Hulu.“The democratisation of the audience is seismic, and what used to happen was that largely white male studio execs were curating not only we were seeing, but what was valued. “The Academy in that year was exposed to have an egregiously high percentage of white male membership. So that’s the lens through which film and TV was both being seen and celebrated. “But with critics and awards having very little impact on what people are actually watching now, it means all those organisations have to catch up with what the audience is actually watching, and it’s made it easier to discredit them and say ‘Well, by the way, you’re irrelevant, I don’t agree with you and I’m finding out you’re corrupt’.”The A United Kingdom actor, to be fair, has been nominated for multiple awards throughout his illustrious 25-year long career, though has had to sit on the sidelines for work that deserved to be honoured while his white peers were celebrated.Asked if he was even remotely “hurt” by actors’ support of awards season over the years, Oyelowo was diplomatic. “No … No not at all.”He added: “Being nominated for an Oscar or winning an Oscar is a life-changing event. I love seeing great work celebrated.“This is an art form I deeply love. I think it makes sense to celebrate good work.“You can’t begrudge people for celebrating being celebrated, but when you know there is an injustice, and we saw this with Black Lives Matter, that’s the moment you’re educated enough to go, ‘Oh, what’s the demographics of the Academy? How many black people are being murdered through police brutality? What’s happening to women in the Middle East?’“Knowledge is power. This is what education does.”Meanwhile Oyelowo, a father-of-four, has embodied a rather different persona for his latest TV miniseries, The Girl Before.Not normally one to play “the bad guy”, he steps into the shoes of troubled architect Edward Monkford in the BBC/HBO Max thriller, with all four episodes streaming on Binge.It follows a woman named Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who wins the opportunity to move into a minimalist London house designed by a famed architect (Oyelowo), though eerie details begin to emerge about the woman who Edward had living there before.“I’ve played historical figures who are iconic, and I guess that’s the kind of work I’m most known for. Peter Rabbit was maybe the only other time I’ve played a kind of bad guy, so I very rarely do that,” he says.“But to me that’s what acting is. The actors who I am so full of admiration for and aspire to be like are chameleonic. So when the opportunity came along, I felt like it was an opportunity to do something very far from me.“I’m a student of humanity. I’m fascinated by us as human beings, so to go into a guy as complex as Edward Monkford, who is attractive enough to draw in these women but repellent enough that you’re kind of going, ‘Ahh, don‘t!’ … That kind of complexity is something I strive for.”Oyelowo says as part of his research for the role, he chatted at length to a therapist to understand Edward’s condition – repetition compulsion.“It was (confronting). It’s a condition where trauma happens and you find yourself going back to it to try and fix it, which of course, is futile,” he says.The Girl Before streams on Binge
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