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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