What Does the Academy Value in a Black Performance?
By BRANDON K. THORP
FEB. 19, 2016
The uproar over
#OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance?
Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them.
These movies have a lot in common, not least that most were directed by white men.
Only three were directed by black men and none by women. Perhaps these numbers aren’t surprising, given the well-known demographics of the film industry. Other numbers are more eye-opening.
Consider: In the history of the Oscars,
10 black women have been nominated for best actress, and nine of them played characters who are homeless or might soon become so. (The exception is Viola Davis, for the 2011 drama “The Help.”)
All 10 performances for which black women have received best-actress nominations involve poor or lower-income characters, and half of those are penniless mothers.
The remaining characters are maids, sharecroppers, criminal-drifter types, impoverished housewives and destitute girls.
Seven of the 10 best-actress nominees played characters with absent or incarcerated husbands, boyfriends, or fathers. And six of the characters suffer physical abuse, with five of them being raped.
Black men have been up for best actor 20 times, with four nominations going to Denzel Washington, three to Morgan Freeman, and two each to Sidney Poitier and Mr. Smith.
In 15 of the 20 films, the nominated performances involve violent or criminal behavior.
Thirteen of the recognized performances involve being arrested or incarcerated.
Ten of the characters have a white buddy or counterpart — or, when it comes to “Lilies of the Field” (1963), a whole convent full of them. In most cases, the white counterpart is the apparent protagonist. Think of Tim Robbins in “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), Jessica Tandy in “Driving Miss Daisy” (1989) or Ethan Hawke in “Training Day.”
Seven of the actors’ films feature no major black female characters. Seven of the characters abuse or mistreat women.
I shared these numbers with Dr. Todd Boyd, the author and professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. He wasn’t impressed, but he also said the focus on the Oscars was misplaced.
“The Oscars are a symptom,” he said, and not the illness itself.
These 28 films are full of enormous characters, men and women of world-historic or pop-cultural significance, people who face seemingly intolerable oppression with nigh-unimaginable resolve, characters who are victimized or who encounter and occasionally inflict cruelty.
What they’re not full of is characters who resemble ordinary people.
It is not entirely surprising that so many of these nominees have portrayed the poor, imprisoned, great or tragic. The history of African-Americans contains many such people, and the academy loves history. Of the 10 most recent best-actor nominees, eight played historical figures. But
the academy has never nominated a black leading actor for a role like Woody Grant in “Nebraska” (for which Bruce Dern was nominated in 2014) — an idiosyncratic person who is both fictional and unexceptional.
“If you had a film about an ordinary black guy — well, that might mean that he knows other black people,” Dr. Petty said.
“Those black people might need to be in the movie, too. And then it’s a black film.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/m...my-value-in-a-black-performance.html?ref=arts
