In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. ‘Selma’ is now.
This guest post by Nijla Mu’min previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.
Historical dramas often stick to a tried-and-true formula: Important figures face struggles, then they triumph, becoming the great people we know today. We can usually count on a scene from their conflicted childhood, scenes showing their romantic troubles, any issues with drugs or alcohol, and how they persevered through it all to deliver whatever divine message or artistic gift they possessed.
Ava DuVernay’s new Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma, avoids this formula—much to its benefit. It is one of the most effective, well-crafted historical biopics that I’ve ever seen because it goes off the traditional narrative about the Civil Rights Movement, giving us a moment in history that feels immediately familiar to the moment we are currently living in.
Selma captures the tireless efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of black activists attempting to secure equal voting rights for black people. These efforts led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The film takes its name from the series of marches that King and his followers embarked on at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. One of those marches was infamously known as “Bloody Sunday,” after police and deputized locals descended on the protesters with nightsticks and tear gas. DuVernay and Director of Photography Bradford Young capture that march in all its terror in a scene where young and elderly marchers are clubbed and chased by angry police on horses. Selma certainly doesn’t cast the history of the Civil Rights Movement in feel-good soft focus.
In a recent interview I conducted with DuVernay, she discussed the way she approached the humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including his suspected infidelity. She was most interested in how this information affected his wife, Coretta Scott King, and how Martin Luther King would respond in the moment when questioned by Coretta. This emphasis on the intimacy in their relationship, rather than the scandal that the FBI sought to publicize, is something that informs the core of the film.
DuVernay is not interested in showing us montages of the unfaithful hero, his mistress, and the scorned wife, as was done in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. She is interested in the complex spaces of love and pain between two people. Coretta Scott King, played with an uncanny resemblance by Carmen Ejogo, takes on a central role in this film, not only as a wife and mother, but as a key player in the movement as she faces daily death threats made against her and her family. The attention and specificity paid to her character and her relationship to King is another gift that DuVernay brings to this film.
Further, there are so many ways this film could’ve become an extension of the Hallmark image that we see of Martin Luther King Jr., one that replays the same “I Have a Dream Speech” and tells us that nonviolence is the only way. While those elements are important, they are often overemphasized at the expense of the other work he did.
That is where Selma fills in the blanks. In this film, we get to know a methodical, intelligent, human Martin Luther King Jr; a man who just wanted to sit down at the end of the day and smoke a cigarette, or call Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night to hear her sing a soothing gospel song. In the film, he invokes nonviolence but also cleverly provokes outward hatred in his opponents, helping people around the world witness this physical racism in the media. His tactics were risky, his negotiations with the likes of LBJ were grueling, and he was often put in positions of extreme discomfort, along with the many people he worked with.
This is not a film about a man and his followers, but about how a man’s work is informed by the respect he has for the people he works with—and even those he doesn’t. It reflects the movement by emphasizing distinct traits in each of the civil rights leaders it documents, from the youthful resistance of Jimmie Lee Jackson (played powerfully by Keith Stanfield), to the gentle persistence of Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), who appeals to Coretta Scott King in a beautifully rendered scene. That scene and others completely reverse the rhetoric we’ve been fed about who these people were. The warring ideals between Malcolm and Martin aren’t the focus of this narrative, but rather how Malcolm X may have actually intentionally pushed many black people to follow Martin Luther King Jr., helping to strengthen the movement after all. Again, DuVernay utilized Coretta Scott King in a way that shows her role in the movement beyond being a supportive wife. She serves as a sort of peacemaker here.
In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. Selma is now. It lets us into the interior spaces of pain, progress, and movement that no formulaic historical drama could ever capture.
Selma opened Christmas Day in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, and Atlanta. It opens nationwide Jan. 9.
So what can women do about these smear campaigns directed at films by women? Go see films directed by women, support these filmmakers any way you can, whether it’s by filling theaters or participating in social media campaigns. We may not be able to change Academy voters’ minds, but we can continue drawing attention to gender disparities and focus on the positive changes.
This guest post by Lauren Byrd previously appeared at her blog and is cross-posted with permission.
Oscar nominations haven’t been announced yet, but there’s already a campaign to dethrone an Oscar hopeful. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, is a solid choice for film critics (100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but in the weeks following its release, the film has come up against criticism for its portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
During a time when the holiday season detracts from awards season, historians and former members of the Johnson administration voiced their concerns with the film.
Three days before the film’s release, Mark K. Updegrove, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, wrote a piece in Politico, titled, “What Selma Gets Wrong”:
In the film, President Johnson resists King’s pressure to sign a voting rights bill, which—according to the movie’s take—is getting in the way of dozens of other Great Society legislative priorities. Indeed, Selma’s obstructionist LBJ is devoid of any palpable conviction on voting rights. Vainglorious and power hungry, he unleashes his zealous pit bull, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, on King, who is determined to march in protest from Selma to Montgomery despite LBJ’s warning that it will be “open season” on the protesters. This characterization of the 36th president flies in the face of history. In truth, the partnership between LBJ and MLK on civil rights is one of the most productive and consequential in American history.
Updegrove makes his argument about what is and isn’t right about this portrayal, but what the articles about the “Selma controversy” in The New York Times, The Wrap, and other media sites haven’t mentioned is that Updegrove also states that much of the film is correct and an accurate portrayal of the events of that time.
A former aide to Johnson Joseph A. Califano, Jr., wrote a similar piece in The Washington Post and on New Year’s Eve, The New York Times highlighted the charges of inaccuracy against the film in a piece by Jennifer Schuessler, which quoted several LBJ focused authors and historians.
Ava DuVernay on set of Selma
DuVernay isn’t standing silently in the face of the recent criticism. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, she said, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.”
It’s hard not to compare the sudden firestorm of controversy surrounding a potential Oscar hopeful to the controversy in the 2013 Oscar season that befell Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.The debate about that particular film was based on its portrayal of torture and whether the film showed enhanced interrogation techniques producing intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden. Many journalists who had covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as national security, thought the film glorified torture, while film critics classified the film as an accurate depiction of the dark decisions made by the U.S. government during the murkiness of the post-9/11 decade.
It’s even more difficult not to note that both these films are directed by women. While questions about accuracy were also brought up about Lincoln during the 2013 awards season, which was directed by a man Steven Spielberg, the backlash against Zero Dark Thirty drowned out any questions around Spielberg’s film. As a result, Bigelow did not receive a Best Director nomination while Spielberg did. The inaccuracies in Argo, of which there were many, were not as widely discussed, and both Ben Affleck and the film went on to win Oscars.
Selma
This year, another film directed by a man, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, has recently undergone criticism from Mark Schultz, one of the brothers whom the film is based on. But FlavorWire has already written a piece defending the film against Schultz’s remarks.
Compared to Foxcatcher, which has been in theaters since November, the controversy around Selma has received more media play and it’s possible the charges of inaccuracies from historians will affect how future audiences view the film. (It opens nationwide on Friday.)
These smear campaigns against films helmed by women are yet another sign of the disparity of the treatment of men and women in the film industry. So are these smear campaigns a gender issue or simply a coincidence?
As someone who knows enough about the industry to know that the Academy Awards are certainly not based on merit or artistry, but rather on money and publicity, it was still hard to believe smear campaigns were a reality until the 2013 Oscar race when Zero Dark Thirty‘s awards season chances quickly diminish.
Kathryn Bigelow moderating a Q&A with Ava DuVernay after a screening of Selma
So what can women do about these smear campaigns directed at films by women? Go see films directed by women, support these filmmakers any way you can, whether it’s by filling theaters or participating in social media campaigns. We may not be able to change Academy voters’ minds, but we can continue drawing attention to gender disparities and focus on the positive changes. Michelle MacLaren directing Wonder Woman, for instance.
While it’s unclear what effect the controversy will have on Selma and DuVernay’s Oscar chances, let’s hope that in the future, audiences and Academy voters learn how to think for themselves rather than be carried away by the most recent awards season smear campaign. Man or woman.
Lauren Byrd has a master’s degree from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She’s worked in television and recently worked as part of the education team at Brave New Films.
However, I want to challenge that particular narrative: that nothing has changed. If we juxtapose McDaniel’s Mammy alongside Nyong’o’s Patsey, we might realize that, apart from being slaves, their characters are nothing alike. Indeed, from a historical and cinematic context, something significant has changed. Mammy is the mask that pro-slavery apologists used to erase the existence of the Patseys in slavery. It is remarkable that it took 75 years to remove that mask from depictions of cinematic slavery.
Hattie McDaniel
This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. Blog and is cross-posted with permission.
It was not lost on some that, 75 years after Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, the beautiful, poised, and talented Lupita Nyong’o would become the sixth black woman to win that same Oscar—and for playing the same type of role, a slave.
If we count Halle Berry’s Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, that brings the full count of African American women Oscar winners to seven. And when we look at the types of portrayals that won these awards—McDaniel as “Mammy,” Whoopi Goldberg as a con-artist spiritual adviser, Halle Berry as an oversexed and imbalanced grieving widow and mother, Jennifer Hudson as a sassy yet rejected lover singing with much attitude, Monique as a deranged abusive welfare mother, Octavia Spencer as a sassy yet abused maid, and now Lupita Nyong’o as a raped, whipped and victimized slave—it’s very easy to imagine that our subservience as black women (or even our hysteria as women in general; just look at the roles that white actresses often win for) is what is recognizable and later celebrated. In short, such recognition might convince us that nothing has changed.
Classic Mammy dolls
However, I want to challenge that particular narrative: that nothing has changed. If we juxtapose McDaniel’s Mammy alongside Nyong’o’s Patsey, we might realize that, apart from being slaves, their characters are nothing alike. Indeed, from a historical and cinematic context, something significant has changed. Mammy is the mask that pro-slavery apologists used to erase the existence of the Patseys in slavery. It is remarkable that it took 75 years to remove that mask from depictions of cinematic slavery.
There are other changes that we cannot overlook: The fact that McDaniel was forced to sit in the back row the night of the Oscars ceremony, segregated from the rest of her white cast members in the movie Gone with the Wind, contrasts with Nyong’o sitting up front with all the other A-list stars. There is also the fact that McDaniel and other black actors in the Negro Actors Guild fought to remove the n-word from the script of Gone with the Wind, as well as other offensive scenes of racial degradation (shoe-shining her master’s shoes on her knees, or having Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy eating watermelon or being slapped onscreen by Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara). I sometimes wonder: Had the Negro Actors Guild not intervened and those elements remained in the film, would we be able to celebrate this classic without embarrassment? Thanks to the efforts of McDaniel, she infused a long-standing stereotype of Mammy with some complicated humor, and she also helped make Gone with the Wind respectable for later generations.
Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind
But this is 2014, and we no longer play to respectability politics. The Civil Rights generation exposed the harsh realities of slavery’s history, with its legacy of racism and white supremacy, through our own felt experiences; the hip-hop generation embraced and poked holes in the n-word with a vengeance; and the millennial generation rightly condemns the nostalgic lies that movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind have fostered about slavery. Those lies are hard to erase, since the big, expansive movie screen, with its elaborate montage in Birth and dreamy technicolor in Wind, solidified these myths. Against these grand narratives, the marginal and enslaved black woman’s story is often silenced.
It took a no-holds-barred black filmmaker like Steve McQueen to not only face the harshness of slavery—as told in Solomon Northup’s 1853 narrative, 12 Years a Slave—but to paint its cruelty in sharp colors, to sparingly use sound to build up dread or emotional release and especially to cast a dark-skinned actress such as Nyong’o who could interject sexuality and emotional depth to a character who might otherwise have been reduced to symbolic black woman victimhood. Instead, she emerged as the emotional center in one of the few slave movies that fully humanizes the slave story.
Lupita Nyong’o in 12 Years a Slave
Which is why the journey from Mammy to Patsey is a historic big deal. The image of Mammy was deliberately designed by pro-slavery advocates to deny the existence of slave rapes. Her dark skin (now celebrated thanks to Nyong’o’s natural beauty) was loudly negated as an aesthetic ideal. Her big and shapeless body created in the white imagination an image of safety, in which racial mixing did not occur except in the realm of loyal servitude and fierce protectionism. Moreover, her unfeminine, aggressive style made it difficult to view her as victimized by the slave system (imagine how Mammy would look in a scene with Michael Fassbender’s terrifying Edwin Epps).
Mammy was literally the visual opposition to Scarlett O’Hara, someone confined to slavery and sidekick status to the white heroine. Contrast such a pairing with Patsey and Mistress Epps (portrayed icily by Sarah Paulson), two women confined to the same man while one is given the privilege of her class position as wife and the power of whiteness to subjugate Patsey to cruelty and violence—an added insult to the injury of sexual violence that Patsey must endure from her master.
Lupita Nyong’o
12 Years a Slave removes the masks from Gone with the Wind, and we recognize this through the very different depictions of Mammy and Patsey. As we bask in the afterglow of Lupita Nyong’o’s win—the climax to a whirlwind awards season in which we witnessed Nyongo’s transformation “up from slavery” to red-carpet fashion icon and role model for darker-skinned women everywhere—her Oscar acceptance speech said it best:
“It does not escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s, and so I salute the spirit of Patsey.”
How can we, like Nyong’o, salute the spirit of Patsey? It only took 75 years for us to even catch a glimpse into the truth of her life. I would call that cinematic progress, and it’s merely the tip of the iceberg of painful history that technicolor tried to distort and which we can now watch with a bit more realism.
The 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony aired last night, and a billion viewers around the world struggled to stay awake. The show had a notably slow pace, with more time for introduction clips and acceptance speeches and less “Isn’t Hollywood Grand?” foofaraw (which, to be fair, a lot of people say they want. I happen to really like the foofaraw). Ellen DeGeneres’s hosting was more laid back than I am hosting an Oscar-watching party, and when I take a break to hand out pizza there’s still stuff to watch on screen. And ‘Gravity’ swept the technical awards, giving the overstuffed middle of the show a certain monotony.
If you fell asleep, never fear! I’ll recap for you the bullet points a feminist movie fan needs to know:
The 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony aired last night, and a billion viewers around the world struggled to stay awake. The show had a notably slow pace, with more time for introduction clips and acceptance speeches and less “Isn’t Hollywood Grand?” foofaraw (which, to be fair, a lot of people say they want. I happen to really like the foofaraw). Ellen DeGeneres’s hosting was more laid back than I am hosting an Oscar-watching party, and when I take a break to hand out pizza there’s still stuff to watch on screen. And Gravity swept the technical awards, giving the overstuffed middle of the show a certain monotony.
Ellen DeGeneres hosting the 2014 Oscars
If you fell asleep, never fear! I’ll recap for you the bullet points a feminist movie fan needs to know:
Pharrell Williams wears short pants with a tuxedo , is not a three-year-old ringbearer.
Obsession with women’s bodies and dresses on the red carpet: ongoing
This is a complicated one. Fashion is fun and Red Carpet Style is a vital component to the glamour of the Oscars. But what bugs me is men largely getting a pass from this spectacle. Pharell had to wear SHORTS with his tux on the red carpet to hit ONLY SOME of the Worst Dressed lists.
Look at those shoes! No wonder she fell!
Jennifer Lawrence tripped again, “she’s so fake” backlash threat level: midnight
Jennifer: JUST WEAR FLATS.
Jordan Catalano has an Oscar.
Cishet dude wins Oscar for playing trans woman
In 30 years, this is going to be as cringeworthy as white people playing characters of color. At least I hope. Also, said cishet dude was JORDAN CATALANO, and I’ve had over a month to prepare for this inevitability and I still can’t handle it.
Norma Rae: one of five or so female heroes the Academy could remember
It essentially meant montages of male protagonists of movies. Being a man in a movie = being a hero. For women to be heroes, well, they have to be Norma Rae or Ellen Ripley, pretty much.
What attention whores!
Ellen’s epic selfie breaks Twitter
(Insert 10,000 word thinkpiece on selfies and self-identity vs. self-objectification oh wait there are already a million of those and I don’t really care.)
Jennifer Lopez and Lupita Nyong’o backstage after Lupita won Best Supporting Actress
Lupita Nyong’o wins Best Supporting Actress, continues to be perfect
Expect coverage to focus on her “beating Jennifer Lawrence” instead of her brilliant performance and deeply moving acceptance speech.
This is what Wonder Pets! are, incidentally.
Robert Lopez joins EGOT club, with an asterisk
His Emmys are Daytime Emmys (for the music for a kids show called Wonder Pets!). I am TORN on this because my gut tells me to be a purist and only count primetime Emmys, but seeing as how daytime television is largely geared toward women and children, shouldn’t feminists champion the Daytime Emmys as an equally important award? Anyway, be sure to bring up that argument to any snobs like me who try to downgrade Robert Lopez’s EGOT.
Cate Blanchett: movies about women are not “niche experiences.”
Feminists continue to feel conflicted as Cate Blanchett champions women in film, thanks Woody Allen
Steve McQueen literally jumps for joy accepting his Best Picture Oscar.
12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Because it was the best picture, not because of white guilt.
Ellen’s joked in her opening chit chat, “Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Possibility number two: you’re all racists.” I laughed. It’s got a harsh ring of truth to it. But it sets up a narrative, bolstered by Gravity‘s sweep of the technical awards and Alfonso Cuarón’s win for Best Director, that the Academy only voted 12 Years a Slave Best Picture out of some feeling of obligation. Nope. Nuh-uh. 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture because it was THE BEST PICTURE. Gravity is an astounding film and a technical marvel; it deserved its run of awards. And Best Picture/Best Director splits are not that uncommon—it’s happened six times in the last twenty years. I hoped we put this whole “HOW CAN THEY BE DIFFERENT?” conversation to bed last year with Argo, and I don’t want to see it popping up again as some way to undermine the achievement of 12 Years a Slave.
What else ruffled your feminist feathers or smoothed them back down during this year’s Oscars?
The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.
Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?
Two of this year’s Oscars contenders–The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle–are based on true stories. These stories center around greed and corruption. The characters cheat and lie their way into and out of the American Dream.
The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.
Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?
In both The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle, women plant the ideas that become the stories themselves. We shouldn’t point at them and scream, “Jezebel!” or blame them entirely for the greed and corruption. Instead, I think it’s important that we recognize them as part of the story, and not as characters who need saving.
The Wolf of Wall Street‘s quiet, victimized femme fatales are harder to identify. In fact, when we watch The Wolf of Wall Street, the power and corruption of bloated, desperate masculinity screams at us from every frame–women are objectified, and men hold the power.
However, some key moments in Jordan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) professional life are influenced by women. When he loses his first job on Wall Street after Black Monday, his wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) shows him an ad for a job at the Investors Center, where he goes to sell penny stocks quite successfully. When he starts taking people’s money in earnest, Teresa says, “Wouldn’t you feel better selling to rich people who could afford to lose money?” The rest is history.
Teresa
Then come the strippers and the marching band, and the scathing “Wolf of Wall Street” article in Forbes. There’s “no such thing as bad publicity,” Teresa says.
Pretty soon, Jordan is hooked on quaaludes. He points out that the history of quaaludes–how they were first prescribed to housewives, and then became recreational drugs (this Paris Review article notes that they were prescribed to “nervous housewives” and went on to be discovered by “curious teenagers” who raided their mothers’ medicine cabinets). Here we have a shift: all of a sudden, what was once a woman’s game was now co-opted, blown out of proportion, and reckless.
Soon, Jordan is with Naomi (Margot Robbie). He goes into her apartment and is beeped by Teresa (“Go home to your wife,” he says to himself). Naomi steps out naked, and they have sex instead.
She didn’t come, though. It’s pointed out that she doesn’t come, which is important–she’s seductive, but not satisfied. She’s sexy, but not sexual. (Or maybe Scorsese was trying to avoid an NC-17 rating, since doing blow out of a prostitute’s ass crack is R material, but female orgasms are just too scandalous.)
Naomi’s “power”
Teresa and Naomi both are suddenly victims, discarded and consumed by Jordan’s lifestyle. We feel sorry for them, and they seem to be powerless (except for Naomi’s use of withholding sex). Their motivations and their power are erased by misogyny (figuratively in the story, or literally through violence and rape). I suppose this is actually in keeping with history–a history that favors men, and typically erases women’s involvement.
However, in American Hustle, Sydney (Amy Adams) shares center stage. She is a formidable scammer. She fabricates a persona, adopts an accent, and partners with Irving (Christian Bale) as a scam artist. Her power is fairly clear, and her nomination for the Best Actress Academy Award reflects her spotlighted role.
When Sydney and Irving meet, they are both already con artists in their own right. Sydney points out to Irving “how easy it could be to take money from desperate people.” With her involvement, his business takes off. Irving was a small player before Sydney; she takes their business to the next level.
Sydney has control
Before long, though, Sydney is a damsel in distress–needing to be rescued by either Richie (Bradley Cooper) or Irving, and pitted against Irving’s wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Her jealousy and cattiness take over, and she and Rosalyn seem at times to be liabilities because of their unbridled passion. All of a sudden, Sydney’s role as a powerful female force is whittled away. I want to be able to look at a female character and fully realize her power and potential, and recognize her role as an agent of change–even if that change is corrupt. It’s unfortunate to watch her weaken because of romantic relationships, and for her adversary to be the wife who almost tears everything down with her jealousy.
There’s a relatively happy ending for Irving and Sydney–they have legal jobs, and share custody of Irving’s adopted son, while Rosalyn has also found a new partnership. I don’t deny that Sydney is a strong character in her own right; however, a viewer could easily see her role as softened, muted somehow because of her jealousy.
Jealousy takes over
It’s simply too easy for viewers to file women away in the “victim” category, or to not take them seriously as power players. Don’t get me wrong–I don’t think the answer to this problem is to always force female characters into leading roles, especially if the story on screen revolves around a male character. But there must be a way to avoid victimizing women and dismissing their motivations and actions, overshadowing them by female tropes. The male supporting characters are able to be seen as complex–American Hustle‘s Richie, Carmine (Jeremy Renner), and Stoddard (Louis C.K.), and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Donnie (Jonah Hill), Patrick (Kyle Chandler), and Max (Rob Reiner) are likable and despicable, sympathetic and sinister. It’s possible.
I also wouldn’t want viewers to blame the women fully for the men’s actions, seeing them as simply vamps or temptresses who lead men astray. There’s some kind of middle ground that needs to be explored–and that ground is seeing women as complex human beings.
The women in The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle have power in pivotal moments, but it seems too easy for the audience to disregard due to cultural expectations and ideas about women and story lines that have them fade–just enough–into stereotypes. When women have formidable power behind the scenes, it would be nice to see that fully realized on the screen. We need a culture shift to move away from the dangerous dichotomies that wedge women into Madonna or whore, damsel or temptress. It’s up to writers and audiences to make that a reality.
One of the interesting dimensions covered in that piece is that the majority of people of color nominated for Oscars played roles that “had” to be portrayed by a person of that race. This is a sad reflection on the limited roles available for actors of color.
Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously
The term “racebending” refers to situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color. In the past, practices like blackface and yellowface were strategies used by Hollywood to deny jobs to actors of color… Because characters of color were played by white actors, people of color were hardly represented at all–and rarely in lead roles. While white actors were freely given jobs playing characters of color in make-up, actors of color struggled to find work.
(The term “racebending” is also used refer to the usually positive and exciting practice of casting a person of color in a role previously/traditionally played by a white person, but this article focuses on the sadly much more common dark side of racebending.)
I decided to take a look back at the acting nominations in the Academy Awards’ 86-year history to see how many examples of racebending were honored with nominations or awards. The results are unsurprising, yet still incredibly disappointing.
There are a few distinct forms of the bad kind of racebending. The most obvious and arguably most egregious is “black/brown/yellow/red-face,” where a white actor plays a person of color by wearing makeup.
Hugh Griffith’s Oscar-winning brownface performance in Ben-Hur
Then there is the strange Hollywood treatment of all “vaguely ethnic” actors as interchangeably castable in any PoC role. In the past, this meant actors we’d now code white playing characters of color, e.g. George Chakiris as Bernardo in West Side Story, but this lives on today with “brown is brown!” casting, e.g. Maori actor Cliff Curtis‘s globe-spanning character roster. There’s some overlap between this and the first category.
Greek American George Chakiris as Puerto Rican Bernardo in West Side Story
And then there is whitewashing, the insidious form racebending that erases the race or ethnicity of a character (often a real-life figure) to cast a white person in the role.
Jennifer Connelly’s Oscar-winning portrayal of a whitewashed Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind
Each of these types of racebending are represented in Academy Award-nominated and -winning performances. My list below is most likely incomplete. Lists on Wikipedia and TV Tropes and articles by Michelle I. on Racebending and Tanya Ghahremani on Complex.com got me started. I then attempted to thoroughly review the complete lists of winners and nominees to find other instances. I am sure I missed some, particularly in the whitewashing category. If you can think of other examples, please share in the comments!
There are also “gray area” examples such as half Indian Brit Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi in heavy brown makeup, Siberian Russian Yul Brynner playing the King of Siam, and Robert Downey Jr.’s role as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris in Tropic Thunder, which was meant to parody this entire phenomenon, but, you know, was still a white actor in blackface receiving an Oscar nomination in 2008. I’ve left these examples in the list but with asterisks.
Oscar-winning race-bent performances with a white actor in makeup to play a PoC:
Luise Rainer’s Oscar-winning yellowface performance in The Good Earth
1937 Best Actress: Luise Rainer as O-Lan in The Good Earth
1959 Best Supporting Actor: Hugh Griffith as Sheikh Ilderim in Ben-Hur
1982 Best Supporting Actress: Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously
*1982 Best Actor: Ben Kingsley (light-skinned half-Indian in makeup) as Mohandas Gandhi in Ghandi
Oscar-nominated race-bent performances with a white actor in makeup to play a PoC:
Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!
1937 Best Supporting Actor: H.B. Warner as Chang in Lost Horizon
1944 Best Supporting Actress: Aline MacMahon as Ling Tan’s Wife in Dragon Seed
1952 Best Actor: Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!
1955 Best Actress: Jennifer Jones as Han Suyin in Love is a Many Splendored Thing
1959 Best Supporting Actress: Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane Johnson in Imitation of Life
1965 Best Actor: Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello
*2008 Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus as Lincoln Osiris (a white character in blackface, meant to parody this phenomenon, still offensive to many cultural commentators)
Oscar-winning race-bent performances with an “interchangeably ethnic” actor playing a PoC not of his race or ethnicity:
Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’
*1956 Best Actor: Yul Brynner (Russian of Buryat/Mongolian descent) as King Mongkut (Thai) in The King and I
1961 Best Supporting Actor: George Chakiris (Greek American) as Bernardo (Puerto Rican) in West Side Story
Oscar-nominated race-bent performances with an “interchangeably ethnic” actor playing a PoC not of his race or ethnicity:
Jeff Chandler as Cochise in Broken Arrow
1936 Best Supporting Actor: Akim Tamiroff (Armenian) as General Yang (Chinese) in The General Died at Dawn (also in yellowface makeup)
1950 Best Supporting Actor: Jeff Chandler (American Jewish) as Cochise (Apache) in Broken Arrow (also in redface makeup)
1962 Best Supporting Actor: Telly Savalas (Greek American) as Feto Gomez in Birdman of Alcatraz
2003 Best Actor: Ben Kingsley (Half-Indian Brit) as Massoud Amir Behrani (Iranian) in House of Sand and Fog
Oscar-winning race-bent performances with a white actor playing whitewashed PoC:
Whitest Dude Alive runner-up William Hurt as South American prisoner Luis Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman
1984 Best Actor: William Hurt as Luis Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman
2001 Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind
The very sad moral of the story is that Hollywood never “has to” cast a person of color. White supremacy in Hollywood finds a way.
What is telling is the presence of so many films that either elide or sexualize female bodies in the category that presumably represents the best of the best. The Academy clearly has a critical preference for movies about men, with women present primarily as wives and sex objects.
The Wolf of Wall Street
This guest post by Holly Derr previously appeared at Ms. Magazine and is cross-posted with permission.
Jake Flanagin at Pacific Standard and Victoria Dawson Hoff at Ellerecently floated an interesting idea: The Oscars should be entirely segregated by gender. Their proposal would create categories such as Best Female Director and Best Female Writer in addition to the already segregated acting awards.
Though this would lead to recognition of more women working in the field, it wouldn’t solve one of the Oscars’ main gender problems: the Academy Award for Best Picture. Most films are produced by teams of both men and women, making segregation in that category impossible. And yet, the Best Picture category is where we can see the clearest evidence of the Academy’s preference for male-driven films. Only three of the nine films nominated this year even have women in leading roles: American Hustle, Gravity and Philomena.
Perhaps as significant as the lack of women characters is the treatment in these films of women’s bodies. The main female character in Her is not even human, allowing the film and its central relationship to avoid dealing with the messy reality of women with bodies. In Dallas Buyers Club, one of the two female-gender-identified characters is played by a cisgender man, effectively replacing a body that would raise interesting questions about the difference between sex and gender with one that is much easier to understand. One cannot help but wonder, if a trans actor had played the role, in which category would she be eligible for a nomination?
Where women’s bodies are present in these films, they are almost always objectified through an emphasis on their sexuality. In The Wolf of Wall Street, one woman has sex on top of a pile of money (the actor says her back was covered with paper cuts after filming) and another woman literally wears money. One could argue that these moments are designed to reveal the callousness of the male characters, but in imagining and glamorizing a world without any female characters who aren’t objectified, the film ultimately endorses its characters’ worldview. The main female character in 12 Years a Slave is literally a possession, and she is repeatedly raped. Unlike with TheWolf of Wall Street, which encourages the audience to identify with criminals, 12 Years a Slave invites us to sympathize with the victim rather than the perpetrator. In this way, the film does at least provide a critique of turning women into objects, rather than an endorsement.
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle provides the clearest example of Hollywood’s inability to deal with women’s bodies without sexualizing them.Though most of the fashions in which the male characters adorn themselves–from the polyester to the conspicuous chest hair to the hairstyles–are quite unsexy, the women are dressed in ways that reveal their every curve. Though plunging necklines were popular for evening wear in the era portrayed in the movie, women also wore formal dresses that, by today’s standards, look like your grandmother’s nightgowns. During the day, women wore button-up shirts with large collars; the most popular woman’s outfit of the decade was the pantsuit, and hair was more commonly worn natural than elaborately styled.
American Hustle
It makes sense for Amy Adams’ character to wear a dress cut down to her belly button, but when her character impersonates a British aristocrat, it would have been more logical to have her button up. She would still have been sexy and her talent would have shone just as brightly without an outfit that invites the viewer to spend most of the scene staring at her boobs. Similarly, the notion that a troubled housewife would wear her hair in an updo all the time is incongruent both with Jennifer Lawrence’s character and with the style of the time.
The contrast between the body of Christian Bale’s character and those of his lovers is especially striking. Whereas Bale’s character has an outside that matches his inside–his corrupt, conniving character is manifest in his weight, physical health and unnatural hairpiece–Adams’ and Lawrence’s characters are gorgeous despite their twisted insides. I would love to see a version of this film in which the women’s bodies, the clothes they wear and the hairstyles they sport are as reflective of their unsavory inner selves as the men’s are.
Only two of the nine films nominated for Best Picture are genuinely about women, and the difference in how women’s bodies are treated in those films versus the other seven is telling. Sandra Bullock spends much of Gravity in shorts and a tank top, yet at no point is she sexualized. One might note that she looks strong and healthy, but one’s eyes are not deliberately focused on her breasts either by her costume or the camera. The unnecessary addition of [SPOILER ALERT!] a lost child to Gravity betrays Hollywood’s inability to portray women without reference to their biology, but even the final shot in which the camera slowly pans from Bullock’s feet to her head is much more about showing her strength than it is about showing her girl parts.
Gravity
Philomena is a film centered around a woman’s reproductive past, yet it trounces the competition in its fully human representation of a woman character. Unlike Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle, Judi Dench is old enough to conceivably be the woman she portrays. Close-ups of her face make no attempt to hide signs of age, revealing a beautiful woman whose wrinkles only make her intense emotional experience all the more gripping. Though the film is about the woman’s search for her lost child, the woman herself is far more than a mother on a mission. She loves her children, but she also loves sex. She’s a woman of faith, she’s openly accepting of gay people, she loves to read and she makes friends everywhere she goes. This is not to say that every female lead in every movie needs to be a saint; most real women are not. But is there any other female character in this year’s nominees for Best Picture about whom the audience learns so much and in whom they become so deeply invested because of whom she is instead of what?
You might question whether the absence/objectification of women’s bodies in this year’s Best Picture nominees reflects on Hollywood or the culture as a whole. None of these films would necessarily be problematic on its own—12 Years a Slave in particular performs the important function of detailing the violence under which female slaves really lived and showing slave owners to be as oppressive as they really were. What is telling is the presence of so many films that either elide or sexualize female bodies in the category that presumably represents the best of the best. The Academy clearly has a critical preference for movies about men, with women present primarily as wives and sex objects.
Though segregating awards by gender would up the profile of women working in Hollywood, it would also perpetuate the notion that there is something fundamentally different about work created by women and work created by men. And it would not solve the fundamental problem at the heart of Hollywood: Movies about men are more highly valued than those about women.
Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom.
The hunters write history. The hunters glorify themselves. The hunters’ history infiltrates itself into the very fabric of our cultural narrative, so we’re only comfortable with seeing the complexities of the hunters, and the simplicity of the lions.
It’s fairly clear what roles Hollywood is most comfortable with: for Black characters, passivity, tired stereotypes, and villainy get the highest awards. For women, wives/daughters/mothers/sisters/girlfriends–all roles in relationship to men–are rewarded.
Black men and women, organized by character type, who have won Academy Awards. (The Black actors up for 2014 Academy Awards–Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, and Barkhad Abdi–play a kidnapped freed man/slave, slave, and Somali pirate, respectively.) Click to enlarge.
For men (who are almost all white), the category with the most winners is “Historical.” For men, there are countless historical roles to fill, so filmmakers can tell the stories of those who have shaped our history and culture–or at least, those whom we see and are told about. And this has been a history that has been largely unkind to Black people and women.
In an interview, late author Chinua Achebe quoted the following proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
The hunters write history. The hunters glorify themselves. The hunters’ history infiltrates itself into the very fabric of our cultural narrative, so we’re only comfortable with seeing the complexities of the hunters, and the simplicity of the lions.
It is what we’ve been trained for since birth.
This is a history that the lions have had to fight and claw their way out of, yet we don’t see them in Hollywood. The lions write, the lions pitch, but the hunters are not interested. (And the hunters have the money, from generations of oppressing the lions.)
I’d be happy to see the hunters start telling the lions’ history, even just a little bit (I salivate at the thought of Quentin Tarantino taking on suffragettes).
Three of this year’s Best Picture nominations (12 Years a Slave, Wolf of Wall Street, and American Hustle) are films that are based on real stories–and each of these stories, on some level, is about white men fucking people over so they can get rich. And at the end of these stories, the white men don’t really get punished. This is our history.
This is our history.
So how can we blame the Academy for reflecting this history back at us? Art is imitating life, and life keeps imitating art. If the two are so inextricably related (which they are), where do we go from here?
I’m not one who argues that it’s all about the Bechdel Test, or that we need to demand the Perfect Feminist Film. Some of the most potentially empowering films that I’ve seen (that feature female and Black protagonists) would be solidly placed in the “exploitation” category (Blaxploitationespecially). We need to demand female and Black anti-heroes if we want true, complex characters and stories.
See this, this, and this. (Who gave the lions a dictation machine, anyway?!)
As I argued in regard to 12 Years a Slave, we have barely started to deal with our country’s history, and we need to, desperately. But still–the only white American actor who is prominently featured in the film was Brad Pitt, who plays a heroic Canadian. It’s hard to face.
In American Hustle and Wolf of Wall Street, the white male protagonists are complex–they aren’t good, but they are whole. They are criminals. They are cheaters. But audiences kind of like them–or at the very least, accept them.
Our goal as lions, then, may not be to just tell our stories. We need to become hunters, and find those stories and demand that they be told. We need to face a history in which Black hunters and female hunters have been punished, and white male hunters have prevailed. We may not be able to rewrite that history, but we can live within it, and force it into our cultural narrative. (Or, as my husband said after we sat through previews last weekend, “They could just quit telling World War II stories for a while.”)
But here we are, in 2014, facing how the Academy’s choices clearly reflect our history. What do we do with this? We should get angry at history, and attempt to rewrite our future. We should be angry at an American history that has oppressed women and Blacks since its inception.
If Wolf of Wall Street reflects modern history, which it does, we see that white men are still winning (case in point: I can’t use the term “winning” without thinking about a white male actor who “allegedly assaulted, threatened, harassed, abused, and—in one incident—shot women” and yet still was the highest-paid actor on television in 2010).
If we want to tell revolutionary women’s and Black people’s stories, we’ll have to settle for a lot of tragedies. There aren’t slaps on the wrists or a few months in a cushy white-collar prison for these historical figures. There’s torture, lynching, and shame. And the villains are almost always white men.
So we’re back to the hunter. And what we know about hunters is they don’t come back bragging about their losses; they brag about their wins. It’s time for them to stop winning, and for the lions to be heard. Then, and only then, can we expect the Academy to reflect a new reality.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
When Jordan says to his staff, “Stratton Oakmont is America,” he wasn’t, as he typically was, full of shit. That was one of the truest statements in the film. … But even if we are adequately critical of the reality of Jordan Belfort’s story, how much can we expect from audiences who, like the audience at the end of the film, want at some level to know Jordan’s secrets?
At the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) gives a motivational sales speech to an audience. The audience members stare at him, slack-jawed, trying to absorb his infinite sales “wisdom.”
They are revering and listening to a criminal–a man who had been indicted and served time for fraud.
The problem with Martin Scorsese’s treatment of the real Jordan Belfort autobiography isn’t the misogyny. It isn’t the drugs, or the perceived celebration of excess.
Instead, the problem with The Wolf of Wall Street is those slack-jawed (or cheering) audiences who don’t seem to understand that this is meant to be a post-modern morality play. The fact that Scorsese doesn’t adequately “punish” Jordan in the film is necessary, because Jordan wasn’t adequately punished in real life.
I suppose it’s easy to miss that, since an aspect of America that’s as important as bootstraps and apple pie is to whitewash a white history that’s been written–or rewritten–by greedy white men. When Jordan says to his staff, “Stratton Oakmont is America,” he wasn’t, as he typically was, full of shit. That was one of the truest statements in the film.
From a feminist perspective, I can understand that the three-hours of objectified and largely one-dimensional female characters can seem overwhelming and disappointing. However, how do we think Jordan Belfort sees women? How do we think Wall Street treated/treats women? Feminists should want to be shown and disgusted by this, because we are supposed to be disgusted with everything in Jordan’s world. Our ire should be pointed toward audiences who don’t get it.
But even if we are adequately critical of the reality of Jordan Belfort’s story, how much can we expect from audiences who, like the audience at the end of the film, want at some level to know Jordan’s secrets?
Cheers.
The real tragedy in The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t that it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. The tragedy of this film is that it is so real, and that Jordan Belfort is out there, making money, granting interviews, selling his sales techniques, and gaining more and more followers. The reality is what makes me nauseous, not Scorsese and DiCaprio’s treatment of reality. What sent me over the edge was going home and googling “Jordan Belfort,” and then checking my bank account. This is surely how we are supposed to respond–with rage at the injustice of not just Belfort’s case, but also the insidious untouchability of the 1 percent.
In an excellent interview with Deadline, DiCaprio (who also was a producer) says,
I wanted to make an unapologetic film looking at a character in a very entertaining and funny way, and isn’t passing judgment on them but is saying, look, this is obviously a cautionary tale, and what is it that creates people like this? I thought that could somehow be a mirror to ourselves….
That theme has been prevalent in Marty’s work, since Mean Streets. It’s about the pursuit of the American dream, about the re-creation of oneself to achieve that dream, and the hustle that it takes to get there. I see that theme in so many of his films. He’s talking about a darker side of our culture in all these movies, and yet he’s vigilant about not passing judgment on them. He leaves that up to the audience. That’s why it boggles my mind a bit that anyone would ever not realize this is an indictment of that world.
The intent of the filmmakers is clear, and it’s reflected on screen. The humor and lack of judgment has more to do with our culture than with the story itself. And again, if audiences either cheer, or laugh heartily throughout Wolf of Wall Street–they are essentially celebrating a culture that allows this kind of story to happen. If audiences condemn the film itself, I would hope they would instead focus their condemnation on a culture that allows this kind of story to happen and leads audiences to cheer.
In reality, there’s just a little bit of this…
…and then more of this. (But only 22 months of a four-year sentence.)
As the audience at the end of the film is trying to learn something from Jordan Belfort (while further lining his pockets), there’s a distinct sense of hopelessness. DiCaprio points out:
“As we are progressing into the future, things are moving faster and we are way more destructive than we’ve ever been. We have not evolved at all.”
The Wolf of Wall Street is a great film, and features incredible acting. It’s flashy, it’s shiny, it luxuriates in excess while we watch, stunned, powerless. And until we evolve, people will always be laughing and cheering, while desperately seeking Jordan Belfort’s advice.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
The Academy has announced the theme of this year’s Oscars ceremony. Producer Neil Maron announced in an Instagram video, “It’s going to be a celebration of movie heroes: the popular heroes, the real life heroes, the animated heroes, and the superheroes.” Here’s what I’m guessing this will look like: montages juxtaposing Nelson Mandela with Luke Skywalker and Norma Rae with Optimus Prime. Ellen DeGeneres wearing a Captain America costume (‘The Winter Soldier’: in theaters April 4!). Bumpers before the cuts to commercial in which stars talk about their heroes. Someone will say Woody Allen and someone will say “my mom.” Lots of commercials for ABC’s Marvel’s ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ It feels like another desperate attempt to get a younger, male-er audience for the telecast (and, truthfully, one I vastly prefer to hiring Seth MacFarlane to host).
White hands holding Oscar statuettes
The Academy has announced the theme of this year’s Oscars ceremony. Producer Neil Maron announced in an Instagram video, “It’s going to be a celebration of movie heroes: the popular heroes, the real life heroes, the animated heroes, and the superheroes.”
Here’s what I’m guessing this will look like: montages juxtaposing Nelson Mandela with Luke Skywalker and Norma Rae with Optimus Prime. Ellen DeGeneres wearing a Captain America costume (The Winter Soldier: in theaters April 4!). Bumpers before the cuts to commercial in which stars talk about their heroes. Someone will say Woody Allen and someone will say “my mom.” Lots of commercials for ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
All those corporate possessives highlight the blatant commercialism behind the selection of this theme. And not just the obvious aforementioned synergy opportunities for host network ABC (which like Marvel Entertainment, is owned by Disney). It feels like another desperate attempt to get a younger, male-er audience for the telecast (and, truthfully, one I vastly prefer to hiring Seth MacFarlane to host). Even if the superheroes part of the equation doesn’t get the most play (and who are we kidding, it will), I suspect the Oscars ceremony will present myriad objectionable approaches to the concept of heroism. I am adding “Lara Croft appears in a montage of movie heroes” to my drinking game.
Feminist frustration aside, “Movie Heroes” is also simply a BORING theme. It’s too loose a category: it could mean “Characters Who Achieve Greatness” or “Characters Who Triumph Over Evil” or simply “Protagonists!”
I should probably roll my eyes and let this one go. The “theme” of an Oscars ceremony is one of the most forgettable and frivolous parts of a largely frivolous event. I had to look up last’s years theme (it was “The Music of the Movies,” which is what to that Jaws theme-as-orchestra-playoff-music debacle), and I’m not even sure how many of the Oscar ceremonies even HAVE themes, and to my horror I cannot find a list anywhere on the internet.
But my endless mining of the Academy’s database of acceptance speeches reminded me that the 65th Academy Awards in 1992 had a theme of “Oscar Celebrates Women and the Movies.” So at least at one point, the Academy was willing to celebrate themes that could generate actual, you know, interesting content.
12 Years a Slave actors Lupita Nyong’o and Chiwetel Ejiofor and director Steve McQueen
I had hoped that the Academy would use this year’s ceremony to celebrate Black cinema. Even more so after last weekend’s surprising shut-out of actors of color at The Golden Globes (see this great piece by The Root‘s Keli Goff on that disappointment).
Annnnnnnnd I just deleted a paragraph I wrote about how it would be the perfect year for that considering the expected nominees, because the nominations just came out, and, well, why again did I think the Academy would celebrate Black cinema?
The white cast of American Hustle, four of whom are nominated for Academy Awards
While 12 Years a Slavedid nab nine nominations, it is knocked out of the headlines by American Hustle and Gravity, with 10 nods a piece. Nothing for Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Nothing for Fruitvale Station. Long Walk to Freedom couldn’t even get a Mandela death bump to get more than a “Best Original Song” nod for U2. (Hey, remember that time Bono sang “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you” with the “them” being Africans?) I guess I’ll try to take some comfort in Pharrell Williams getting a Best Original Song nomination instead of Taylor Swift.
I’m not playing by my own rules. I shouldn’t expect the Oscars to nominate the worthiest performances or meaningfully reflect on our cultural moment and current place in the history of cinema. I should expect circus performers wearing capes doing interpretive aerial dance to a montage of John Williams themes. I should expect clips of Disney’s Bolt interspersed with Mr. Smith going to Washington. Maybe this year, instead of cutting off speeches with the Jaws theme, Superman will swoop in to pluck those verbose Sound Effects Editors right off the podium and fly them back to the nosebleed seats.
