------- Original Message --------
Subject: [AFAMHED] The Oscars Minority Report: Invisible Blackness
Continues
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:25:28 -0500
From: S. E. Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: S. E. Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Oscars Minority Report
By Judith Mahoney Pasternak
<http://www.indypendent.org/?pagename=author_search&a=Judith%20Mahoney%20Pasternak>
From the February 24, 2008
<http://www.indypendent.org/?pagename=issue&issue=2-24-08> issue of the
Indypendent
*
When Hollywood gathers Feb. 24 to hand out the 80th awards of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a.k.a. the Oscars
millions of people around the world will be watching. While some believe
the awards actually go to the best films, others will know that whoever
gets an Oscar is guaranteed a more lucrative future in the movie
business than those who dont.*
And that night some significant names will be missing from the lists of
winners. Having been completely passed over in the nominations, Denzel
Washingtons /The Great Debaters/ and John Sayles /Honeydripper/ wont
be getting any Oscars, nor will Washington for /Debaters/ or /American
Gangster/ or Danny Glover, or Lisa Gay Hamilton.
/The Great Debaters, Honeydripper/ and /American Gangster/ are all about
African-Americans, and movies about African-Americans dont win Oscars
nor, by and large, do the black actors appearing in them. Oscar is white
at heart and, although anatomically neuter in appearance, male. Hes
also pretty entrenched in the upper class.
So in 2008, as always, the overwhelming majority of the awards will go
to white men, and the overwhelming majority of recognized films will be
about white men.
*
Best Picture: A White Male Preserve*
Not once, in 80 years of supposedly rewarding moviemaking merit, has the
academy named as Best Picture a film about African-American life. Two
Best Pictures In the /Heat of the Night/ in 1968 and /Driving Miss
Daisy /in 1990 were about black individuals living and working in a
white world (and in both cases, the white co-star got the acting Oscar).
Of course, for much of Oscars life, Hollywood didnt make many movies
about black people. But even when that changed, those movies didnt win
Academy Awards. Only three movies actually about African-Americans have
even been nominated for Best Picture: /Sounder/ in 1973, /A Soldiers
Story/ in 1985, and /The Color Purple/ in 1986. All were directed by
white men. In 1992, John Singleton became the first and only Black
nominee for Best Director, for /Boyz N the Hood/, bypassed in the Best
Picture nominations. (That was the same year Oscar ignored Julie Dash,
whose /Daughters of the Dust/ had just become the first full-length
feature film in general release directed by a black woman.)
None of the films of Spike Lee, arguably the countrys most prolific and
creative filmmaker, has been nominated as Best Picture, nor has he been
nominated as Best Director. (In 1998 a movie of his did get a nomination
as Best Documentary: /4 Little Girls/, about the 1963 bombing of the
16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four
Black schoolgirls. It didnt win.)
*Thelma, Louise and Oscar*
Movies by white women have fared marginally better: One woman-directed
film has been nominated as Best Picture Barbra Streisands /Prince of
Tides/ in 1992 but Streisand wasnt nominated as Best Director. Two
years later, Jane Campion did get a Best Director nod (for /The Piano/),
and in 1994, Sofia Coppola was nominated for /Lost in Translation/. None
of those pictures or women won. To date, the Best Directors title is
still as safely male as it is white.
It gets worse: Few films about women have won the Best Picture title,
and only one about a relationship between two women: the 1983
mother-daughter tearjerker /Terms of Endearment/. Remember /Thelma and
Louise/? It never had a chance.
Merely being named for a woman let alone two seems to substantially
decrease Oscar chances. Of the 80 best pictures since 1927-28, only six
won carrying that burden: Rebecca, Mrs. Miniver, All About Eve, Gigi,
Annie Hall and Driving Miss Daisy. (Three times as many 18 were
named for men.) Maybe if the movie had been called Thelma and Her Car
It wouldnt have helped. The odds against a film plummet more steeply
yet if it not only bears a womans name, but was adapted from a work by,
or written by, a woman (as was /Thelma and Louise,/ created by
screenwriter Callie Khoury). Only two movies on the short list of
woman-named Best Pictures were woman-originated: /Rebecca/ (from Daphne
DuMauriers novel) and /Gigi/, from stories by Colette. Pictures about
women but not bearing their names dont win, eitherthink of /Funny
Girl/, /An Unmarried Woman, Coal Miners Daughter, Sense and
Sensibility, The Hours and The Queen/, to name just a few. Even a strong
womans role appears to diminish the likelihood of victory. Nearly a
third 25 of the best picture winners have contained the best
performance by an actor in a leading role, but only 11 had the best
performance by an actress.
*
Doing the Right Thing at Last?*
For now, women if not womens stories are guaranteed at least two
acting Academy Awards a year. African-American actors, on the other hand
like African-American directors are guaranteed nothing, and nothing
is what they got for most of Oscars life. Until six short years ago,
black actors were almost as thoroughly locked out of the Oscars as were
black stories and black directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Julie
Dash, and Gordon Parks. The minimal recognition African-American actors
did receive came via movies in which the stories and the lead roles
were split with, or subordinated to, parallel white ones.
And so we arrive back at /Gone With the Wind/ and the question of how
far weve come. It was /GWTW/ that in 1940 broke the Black actors
barrier, when Hattie McDaniels, for her best performance in a supporting
role as Mammy, became the first African-American to be nominated for and
win an Oscar. From then until 2002, exactly three more awards went to
black actors. In 1964, Sidney Poitier won the first-ever Oscar given to
an African-American for a best performance in a leading role, for
/Lilies of the Field./ It would be 38 years before another black actor
won the top prize; the next two were for supporting roles in 1983, to
Louis Gosset, Jr. for /An Officer and a Gentleman,/ and in 1990, to
Denzel Washington, for /Glory/. McDaniels, Poitier and Gosset had played
black people vis-à-vis white society. Washington played a private in the
first all-black volunteer company in the U.S. Army, but the white actor
Matthew Broderick had top billing as the white officer who led the
company. The long list of unrecognized distinguished black actors
includes the great but leftist Paul Robeson, the late Ossie Davis,
Dorothy Dandridge, Cecily Tyson, Ethel Waters, and James Earl Jones,
possessor of one the most iconic, instantly recognizable voices in film
history.
Yet something seems finally to have changed. In 2002, Halle Berry and
Denzel Washington made movie history when Berry became the first black
woman to win a Best Actress award, Washington became the second black
man to win the Best Actor award, and the two became the first pair of
black actors ever to win Oscars in the same year. Both won for starring
roles opposite white actors: Berry for playing a black woman with a
white lover in /Monsters Ball/, Washington for playing a black cop with
a white partner in /Training Day./ Not until three years ago, in 2005,
did a black actor win the lead acting Oscar for playing a black man in a
black world: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, in the biopic /Ray/. The same
year, Morgan Freeman won Best Supporting Actor for /Million Dollar
Baby/, and last year, Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson repeated the
double-Oscar trick for, respectively, /The Last King of Scotland/ and
/Dreamgirls./
Thus, for those keeping track, in the last three years, black actors
have won four out of 12 acting Oscars. Whether this heralds a change in
Hollywoods treatment of African-Americans remains to be seenbut this
years freezing out of Washington, Glover, Hamilton, and /Honeydripper/
suggests it hasnt happened yet.
*A Touch of Class*
Oscar is also an elitist snob. The list of Best Pictures featuring
kings, princes, and emperors includes /Hamlet, Ben Hur, A Man for All
Seasons, Amadeus, The Last Emperor, Braveheart /and/ Lord of the Rings:
The Return of the King./ On the other hand, only two movies about
workers have ever been named Best Picture: /How Green Was My Valley/ and
/On the Waterfront/. (Stretching a point, one could add /Driving Miss
Daisy/ to that list.) The handful of additional, non-winning nominees
includes /Norma Rae/ and /Erin Brockovich/ (both presumably
double-doomed by being about working-class women). The majority of the
past 80 years worth of films that were consciously about working people
and their real lives including the likes of /The Grapes of Wrath/,
/Salt of the Earth, Silkwood and Matewan/ never reached the
nominations lists.
Or maybe Oscar snubbed those films just because hes resolutely
apolitical. Warren Beatty won Best Director in 1982 for /Reds/, the
first Hollywood film to feature The Internationale in its soundtrack,
but the movie wasnt named Best Picture, and Beattys more pointed and
contemporary Bulworth was ignored in 1999. Other slighted political
films over the years include /The China Syndrome, Born on the Fourth of
July, Good Will Hunting, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana/ and most of
the films of John Sayles and Spike Lee. Substantially overlooked this
year was the handful of antiwar movies including /In the Valley of Elah./
*Say Goodnight, Oscar*
Heres a scenario: 80-year-old statue retires to a Malibu poolside and
spends his Golden Years taking in long drinks with little paper
umbrellas. Spike Lee, John Sayles, Elaine May, and Julie Dash decide
whats good and what isnt.
That should get Best Picture.
Editors note: Whoopi Goldberg also received a supporting Oscar for
/Ghost/ in 1991, and Cuba Gooding Jr. for Jerry McGuire in 1997.
---------------------------------------
author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
http://blackeducator.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------
--
Want an e-mail address like mine?
Get a *free e-mail *account today at www.mail.com
<http://www.mail.com/Product.aspx>!
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
