A Child at the Oscars
By Armond White
Sidney Poitier won his Lilies of the Field Academy Award just before
my 11th birthday. That event was part of the world opening up to me and
changing for everyone. There had already been the March on Washington
featuring Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech,
a hometown civil rights march in The Motor City and the New York World’s
Fair was about to open. In that context, the Motion Picture Academy’s
nod to Poitier indicated some large acknowledgment and even greater potential.
After all, it was era of upward mobility, a period when many white Americans
(and Hollywoodians) pledged allegiance to equality. A 60s child could
feel all this without being able to articulate it.
Many years later, Halle Berry won her Monster’s Ball Academy Award,
accepting it with childlike, halting expressions of shock and naivete.
No matter how many pundits and industry boosters make big claims for Berry’s
win (and Denzel Washington’s), it lacks a larger social resonance.
Berry’s nearly catatonic display was cringe-inducing; it revealed
contemporary black pop artists’ isolation and lack of grounding.
They conflate getting-over with social progress, completely distorting
the Civil Rights Era criterion that connected personal progress with social
movement. Berry’s and Washington’s Oscar wins this year have
nothing to do with justice or equality. Actually, this small event disguises
Hollywood’s pervasive racism, more insidious now because it includes
the black winners’ misguided gratitude--a regression after the Civil
Rights Era (what Poitier called “the difficult times”). They
grovel for acceptance by Hollywood’s racist institution, like pets
wanting petting, children hungry for candy.
Berry and Washington--along with their celebrants--confuse careerism with
racial uplift. They convince themselves that the world benefits from their
being chosen. Nothing encapsulates showbiz enslavement more definitively
than the reactions of a hysterical childlike actress and a childish actor.
Denzel’s more composed response was also cringe-inducing. It was
fatuous--with the hollow tone of stentorian churchy practice, beginning
“God is great. Yes, yes.” Well, yes, He is, but any good Sunday
School student can tell you “God is not mocked.”
***
Sadly, this year’s Oscar hype would have the public believe that
the lead performance nominations for three black actors are milestones
in the history of American pluralism. It reduces a racial minority’s
ongoing struggle to a showbiz contest, as if Hollywood popularity and
acceptance is all good for black people.
Fact is, these particular nominations--if you actually look at the roles
being considered--are embarrassments to every thinking American. Washington
in Training Day plays the screen’s most heinous, law-breaking police
officer as a black renegade--scene by scene refuting the headline truth
about Los Angeles’ recent Ramparts precinct scandal and New York’s
Louima, Diallo and Dorismonde police brutality cases. Berry in Monster’s
Ball. plays a single mother subject to endless humiliation--verbal, physical
and psychic abuse; she plays out a fantasy of the hottie mama on welfare
who literally begs to be taken care of. Will Smith in Ali, merely impersonates
the legendary Muhammad Ali reducing the 60s-70s phenomenon to a charisma-less
enigma.
These characterizations are reactionary throwbacks, each is a sign of
that national epidemic that deforms discourse on race: denial.
While many Americans treat movie-going as a means of escape, movies sometimes
reveal the country’s political unconscious as well as celebrate its
ideals. To judge by the Academy Awards, last year’s films floated
more fantasies of African American crime, demoralization and--what stereotype
is left?-- celebrity. At the movies African Americans cannot escape opprobrium
and we all get our racial fears reinforced.
The Oscars perpetuate biased, simplistic thinking by rewarding actors
who function within the industry as ideological pawns. In the absence
of a social movement that might produce widely recognized leaders and
a united front among enlightened Americans, this year’s Oscar nominees
are no more than tokens--a Wanted poster icon, a pornographic pin-up and
a pop star as the measure of black American experience. How many people
understand the insult of these limited portrayals?
Things were clearer nearly 40 years ago when the Motion Picture Academy
voted Poitier Best Actor, making him the only African American to win
a lead category Oscar until now. (This year, the Academy redundantly honored
Poitier with a career achievement award.) Poitier’s first win, on
the crest of the Civil Rights movement, also made up for the previous
failure to reward his overlooked performance in the classic A Raisin in
the Sun. While there was a whiff of Academy self-congratulation in that
prize, it wasn’t entirely removed from authentic commitment to doing
the right thing, for the right reasons. For Poitier, careerism and activism,
moral conviction and personal ambition were one in the same.
In the years since, Hollywood movies have become more or less visibly
segregated yet black screen portraiture has accommodated ever more nefarious
stereotypes, making racism more entrenched in the film making system.
The result: last year’s most scandalous black performances are emblems
of the country’s racial regression. To applaud Washington, Berry
and Smith’s self abasement is to accept the hard-hearted fallacy
that racism no longer exists. See, now we can defame black people and
not feel guilty about it. They’re even willing to victimize themselves.
None of the films represented by these nominations deal honestly with
the statistical facts of police corruption, the nightmares faced by unskilled
women in the workforce or the controversy--the shock--of Ali’s or
any black individual’s public pursuit of freedom (the latter failing
goes back to Spike Lee turning the thorny Malcolm X into a marketable
commodity). And it’s no surprise that shills promoting this year’s
Oscar hopefuls have not dealt honestly with the current state of black
movie star careerism. The do-anything-for-a-role practices of Washington,
Berry and Smith separate them from Sidney Poitier whose principled career
maneuvers – and belief that movies can ennoble black American life
– made him a standard bearer as well as a great actor.
Our anti-political correctness climate promotes distaste for images of
black heroism and rectitude. That may be why in recent years, the Academy
ignored such outstanding performances as Eddie Murphy in The Klumps: Nutty
Professor 2, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Thandi Newton, Kimberly Elise
and Beah Richards in Beloved, Harry Belafonte in Kansas City; Vivica A.
Fox in Two Can Play That Game, Jamie Foxx in Any Given Sunday, Charles
Dutton in Cookie’s Fortune, Gloria Foster in The Matrix, Sanaa Lathan
in Love and Basketball, Harry Lennix in Titus, Lisa Raye in The Players
Club, Djimon Hounsou in Amistad. These performances were in Poitier’s
creative and self-respecting tradition. Rare examples of black actors
blending talent with principle, politics with artistry. But none were
invited to the party.
“Who are you wearing?”, the question most often asked of celebrities
on the red carpet, is meant to promote fashion designers rather than interrogate
actors’ motives. But this year it seemed to point to Poitier’s
legacy. Imagine what valiant images Washington, Berry and Smith might
produce if they put on his armor.
The sad fact is, despite the rhetoric of today’s hiphop culture,
politics are out of fashion for Black artists in Hollywood. No one should
accept the Oscars without making demands, or at least asking Why!
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