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Oscar The Grouch

Race & The Academy Awards

Was Mary Magdalene A Prostitute?

This is a man who has turned in riveting performance after riveting performance, from Norman Jewison's brilliant A Soldier's Story to Edward Zwick's Glory (for which he won Best Supporting Actor). This is the multifaceted heavyweight of the Spike Lee joints He Got Game and Mo' Better Blues as well as guilty pleasure pop films like Crimson Tide and Fallen. Washington gives meaty performances in two other Zwick films, Courage Under Fire and the little-seen The Siege— a film flawed by bad scripting and not enough soldiers invading Brooklyn, but with a dazzling buddy trio of Washington, Annette Bening and the brilliant Tony Shaloub (Monk) teaming up to battle a wooden Bruce Willis cardboard cutout. But it's not until Washington takes a turn as a sycophant that Oscar® finally takes notice.

The institutionalized nature of racism creates racist acts without necessarily racist intent. I have no doubt the greater majority of voters voted for the best performances, regardless of race. But what made these particular performances outstanding in their minds, when so many other performances of equal or superior creativity didn't grab anyone's attention? Why does a black man have to pick up a gun and a black woman have to perform sexually before we're let in the club?

I am not saying this is what happened. I am not saying this was some major conspiracy to send a message to us and to our children. What I am saying is, this is the mess the Academy has exposed itself to, not by rewarding these performances but by ignoring so many others. Had the playing field been even reasonably level over the past decades, I'd be less suspicious of the gesture's origins and motives. Not that I am unhappy about the win, I am unhappy about The Stink. I'd have preferred a win with less Stink Potential: with less room for unpleasant accusations from the myriad of political interests.

Certainly, the politics of it,

the campaigning of it, played some role. This year, millions of dollars were spent in pursuit of the golden naked guy. It is quite possible this time, Washington's people got their act together and ran a good campaign. And Billy Bob Thornton's arty Ball was, in fact, the critics' darling, so there was a lot to work with already. But, beyond that, why is Washington's turn to foul-mouthed criminality a more outstanding performance that the moral leader Malcolm or the wrongly imprisoned Ruben Carter? Both of those films were vastly superior to Training Day, a severely flawed but highly entertaining guilty pleasure.

Berry's riveting performance as the shell-shocked wife of a death row inmate who later becomes involved with his jailer and executioner (Billy Bob Thornton) was certainly the highlight of the gloriously depressing Monster's Ball, a film that was such a downer, audiences had to come away feeling good about their own lives. No matter what you're going through, at least you're not the hapless Leticia, Berry's character in the film, an impoverished and undereducated woman whose husband's execution leaves her to raise her dysfunctional son alone. This is a person without hope, a woman so thoroughly abused in every conceivable way and by nearly everyone and at nearly every point in her life, that her struggle to move forward is motivated solely by her son. And, once that motive is taken from her, she becomes the least of all souls: a person with nothing and no one to live for.

              

I've met Leticia.

I've probably dated Leticia, a woman so wounded she becomes wholly incapable of accepting or even comprehending love offered her. But Berry's Leticia believably transcends the tragedy in her life and blossoms under Thornton's equally tortured prison guard Hank— who, in turn, discovers the power of love both in Leticia and in himself. Will Rokos' exquisite screenplay layers the unexpected with the inevitable and familiar, as a Hitchcockian ticking clock— silent but thunderously prescient— clicks off the time remaining before the peace these two people have found is destroyed by Leticia's discovering who Hank is— the prison guard who executed her husband. Hank knows who Leticia is, of course, and his slow torture of falling for her without being able to explain his larger role in her life constitutes one of Thornton's most powerful performances to date.

In every way that counts, Monster's Ball is one of the best American films ever made, and deserved far more notice than Oscar afforded it. At this point in her career, Berry has mastered the post-traumatic distress disconnect in her eyes. She has perfected the role of the noble victim she began as the crack mom in the brilliant and largely ignored Losing Isaiah, which was itself derivative of her debut performance as another crack fiend in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. Berry evolved and hardened her street persona into Nina, a character she peels like an onion in the brilliant Bulworth, revealing layer upon layer of a character that begins the film as seemingly disposable eye candy, but quickly moves center stage to drive the film (and its star-director Warren Beatty). Had those films not existed, or had Oscar paid much attention to Berry, those roles or those films, I'd probably have a less cynical reaction to her win this year. But AMPAS awarded Berry for what I consider to be work largely derivative of things she has already done, work Oscar should have paid attention to and didn't, perhaps because, in those earlier films, Berry kept her clothes on. That's the Stink of it. That's what's bothering me about her win, not that she didn't deserve it but that she did. Not that it wasn't a worthy performance but that it was, in fact, just as worthy as the first time she gave it, years ago in other films.

There's no evidence of any Crowe-esque anti-vote swirling around Berry for her win, but the Stink of suspicion and accusation remain. By skipping Berry's earlier performances, by snubbing Whoopie Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey's tour de force tag-team body slam in The Color Purple (ostensibly a snub at Purple director Steven Spielberg, whose big-bucks success demanded, in the political lexicon of the day, that commercial success be its own and only reward), by shutting black women out of the winner's circle for over 70 years, Oscar has left itself exposed to The Stink that it would not reward a black woman until she demeaned herself on-camera with a sexually explicit performance, something not required of Meryl Streep and something Katharine or Audrey or anybody else named Hepburn could never have even conceived of.

        

With all the high-fiving going on

in 'hood's all over America, I think it's worth noting that, by it's traditional snubbing of minority actors, the Academy has left itself open to the charge that Oscar wouldn't reward a black woman until she performed semi-pornographically, and likely rewarded Denzel for playing a negative role model and, more to the point, for not being Russell Crowe. That's The Stink, the look on Washington's face. The polarity that will only be mitigated by the next awards ceremony, when we will see if any of this year's gains are legitimate.

Were these great performances? Absolutely. Did these actors deserve the prize? You betcha. But the Stink of things, of the politics surrounding this, will continue to linger and potentially overshadow their moments. By snubbing so many other fine performances by these and so many other fine actors (Whoopie in The Color Purple, Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, Morgan Freeman in, well, anything, but especially Driving Miss Daisy), and choosing to reward these particular roles at this particular time and under these particular circumstances, the Academy has left itself wide open to criticism of racial bias. Whether or not it is true or whether or not it is earned or fair is irrelevant: the Stink is deserved, not because of what the Academy did a few nights ago, but because of what they've been doing for decades: shutting out minorities and minority-themed films from a seat at the grownup's table.

Christopher J. Priest
1 April 2002
editor@praisenet.org
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