Watching the Oscars Sunday night was fun and fanciful because there’s nothing like watching wealthy, accomplished white people “acting” racially guilty when they’re really quite comfortable in their homogeneous groupings.
I felt invisible watching for other invisible Negroes.
The Academy Awards are reverting to the days when “white” sports like tennis and golf and, for a long time before Jackie Robinson, even baseball excluded blacks.
And while we’re on the subject of playing fields, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in its 87th year and helmed by a black woman, refuses to open up and disclose its diversity practices.
It seems, though, to practice its whiteness by the numbers.
In a category-by-category breakdown published in the Feb. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter, an anonymous Academy member discussed with brutal honesty his (though this could’ve been a woman) voting decisions including his fatigue over talk of “snubs” and the fact that Selma was only getting white-hot attention because it was directed by a black woman and not for any artistic merit.
“What no one wants to say out loud is that Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there’s no art to it. If the movie had been directed by a 60-year-old white male, I don’t think that people would have been carrying on about it to the level that they were. And as far as the accusations about the Academy being racist? Yes, most members are white males, but they are not the cast of Deliverance,” the voter said in the story that went viral days before the Oscars broadcast.
Good point — however, the voter overlooked two finer points.
First, director Ava Duvernay managed to angle her camera in such close proximity to characters during what would be historical and intimate conversations that she made viewers believe we were eavesdropping on our own collective history. She got intimate with a big, unwieldy story and characters with untold gravitas.
Secondly, the voter finessed the fact that most members are white men — which is, in fact, the larger problem plaguing Hollywood in toto and it is the direct genealogical link to the white-out of this year’s Oscars and what’s fraught past racist Oscar races.
According to a 2012 Los Angeles Times survey of 88 percent of Academy members, 94 percent of those members are white; 76 percent are men; their average age is 63. More tellingly, only current members in good standing can invite in new members, which brings to my mind the whites-only golf and country clubs of yore which kept out blacks and Jews.
At least Jews can pass for lily white.
What I loved most about the anonymous Academy voter was his fury over how the Selma cast and director mixed the revolutionary tone of the film’s subject matter with protests happening in real time.
“I’ve got to tell you, having the cast show up in T-shirts saying ‘I can’t breathe’ — I thought that stuff was offensive. Did they want to be known for making the best movie of the year or for stirring up shit?”
Wow.
This tells me Duvernay et al. were no doubt punished and therefore overlooked in other major categories (David Oyelowo for Best Actor; Oprah Winfrey for Best Supporting Actress) for their personal politicization of the film. Also, I think they got their knuckles rapped for portraying President Johnson as slow-footed on civil rights (as were, historically, presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Kennedy before him) when (white) historians have heretofore portrayed Johnson as The Negro’s Friend.
This says, unequivocally: Yaaas, be-otch, you may be able to get away with tweaking your narrative to suit your tastes and revenge fantasies, but you will not be rewarded for your bad behavior. It’s true the voices in my head sometimes sound like sassy gay men on Twitter.
In interviews, Duvernay never backed down when pinned for her dramatization of Johnson’s relationship with the Rev. Martin Luther King.
Selma was snubbed despite protests to the contrary by that Academy voter and despite Best Original Song win for Common and John Legend (that’s like giving Jordan or LeBron an NBA title; we know black men can sing, rap and hoop). Quibbling over the snubs in acting and directing categories is as my grandmother Mary Hill used to say, “a triflin’ thing.”
It does feel nitpicky and trifling, but it’s still extremely important, nonetheless, because it signals that Hollywood is ruled by a great, white hand and that we want — no, need — so much from this one film, one actor and one director.
Damn.
It’s real out here when so much weight is placed in one place. There are so many prominent places in popular culture — like film — when blacks don’t get the luxury of bantering the virtue of a black-helmed Birdman or a black-produced Boyhood or whether Viola Davis (Julianne Moore) will finally get that Oscar she deserves or whether Oprah Winfrey (Meryl Streep), after 19 nominations and only a few wins, will get another.
Get my meaning?
Re-reporting “The Minority Report” gets old and bothersome.
Who said it was OK to disallow black-skinned people the rights and freedoms to make (“green light” as they say in Hollywood parlance) everyday films about everyday graces and disappointments? Is it us? Have we blacks, by our movie-going tastes in broad slapstick, bad grandmamma drag and buddy-cop flicks told Hollywood we’re not interested in seeing ourselves as everyday people and, therefore, incapable of making those kinds of films?
According to the Huffington Post, this year was the whitest Oscars since 1998. From 1999 to 2014, a spate of black, black African, Latino/a, Asian and Irani actors were nominees and winners. Before 1999, it was white business as usual. Clearly, we’re employed and honored in blocks of time. I’d love for us to be folded in like stiff-peaked whipped cream.
Ava Duvernay and David Oyelowo are next making a film about Hurricane Katrina.
Look out, Hollywood.
Then, look away.
It’s what you do best.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2015.
