Oscar Race

It’s time to dispel another Oscar myth: That The Academy is racist.

It’s an easy accusation to make (one I most recently spotted here, where the usually on-the-ball Sasha Stone thinks that Jamie Foxx “has to overcome the stigma of being black,” which is preposterous) and on the surface it may even appear to be substantiated by a simple glance at the lists of acting nominees. But looking beyond that, it’s clear that the relative dearth of minority winners and nominees has very little to do with The Academy itself and everything to do with the Hollywood machine (of which, certainly Academy members are a part) and moviegoers (both foreign and domestic). All of this isn’t to say that there’s not an injustice that needs to be rectified – just that it’s lazy and misguided to blame The Academy.

The acting nominations are first and foremost about the roles, not the actors. There are dozens of great, award-worthy actors working in Hollywood (and outside of it), but only when they get the right role in the right movie do they have a legitimate shot at an Oscar nomination. Sure there are a few exceptions and several actors who seem to get nominated no matter what they do (though even Nicholson, Streep and Hanks have been denied nods from time to time), but the truth is, a good actor in a great role has a better shot than a great actor in a good role.

Unfortunately, there are very few quality, Oscar-baiting roles for minorities in Hollywood (a discussion of the many reasons why is better left for another time – and one that could tie into my last post, since perhaps the pretty, young women are dominating the Oscars because they get offered the most plum roles) -- much fewer than the number of truly stellar minority actors vying for them. However, when African-Americans, Asians and Latinos have landed the right roles, they’ve been nominated with at least as much frequency as Caucasians. I can think of tons of white actors who were labeled sure-fire contenders that never materialized, but (sadly) only a few highly buzzed about performances by minorities come to mind.

Off the top of my head:

Samuel L. Jackson had some heat in 1991, 1996 and 1997 for Jungle Fever, A Time To Kill and Jackie Brown respectively (winning a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Fever and Golden Globe nominations for the latter two).

Djimon Hounsou was nominated for a Golden Globe for Amistad, but had several things working against him at the Oscars – the tepid response to the film itself, a very competitive Best Actor category (even Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t get carried along by the Titanic wave) and the fact that this was his first major role (something that tends to work much better for Actresses and Supporting Actors than for Lead Actors).

Any early buzz for the actors in Beloved died once people saw the movie.

Jeffrey Wright’s role in Shaft, while thoroughly entertaining and briefly buzzed about, wasn’t exactly the stuff Oscar nominees are made of (though apparently it was the stuff Toronto Film Critics Association Awards are made of).

Zhang Ziyi had generated some significant buzz for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that was always a truly uphill battle. It’s pretty tough to get nominated for a foreign-language performance, no matter what the ethnicity.

Derek Luke and Denzel Washington in Antwone Fisher at one point showed great potential, but the film itself (unjustifiably) bombed, Washington had just won the year before and Luke wasn’t even nominated for an Image Award (they nominated Morgan Freeman for High Crimes instead).

There was some bitterness and cries of racism way back in 1995 when Don Cheadle wasn’t nominated for Devil in a Blue Dress, which I still haven’t seen so I can’t comment on the performance itself – but that right there seems to be a more plausible explanation: not enough people saw the movie. He seems to have a serious -- though by no means guaranteed -- shot again this year for Hotel Rwanda. Aside from the film possibly being too small (though after wins in Toronto and The AFI Fest, it’s gaining momentum) and the Best Actor category being too crowded, I think Cheadle’s biggest hindrance may be the bad sportsman-like words he had for The Academy back then. Yet if they can honor Sean Penn, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp (not to mention nominate post-Patton George C. Scott once, post-Sacheen Littlefeather Marlon Brando twice and perennial Awards no-show Woody Allen a whopping 20 times), why shouldn’t they look past Cheadle’s comments?

That’s all I can think of. If you can think of any others from the last fifteen years (not merely great, over-looked performances, but ones that legitimately smelled like serious awards-players at the time), please post them in the Comments section.

If you don’t trust me, look at Entertainment Weekly’s early lists of "Oscar's Hopefuls," where they include everyone from sure bets to the longest of long shots. On this year’s list, out of the 78 total actors they cite, there are only 11 people of color (six African-Americans, one African-Brit, three Latinos and one Asian-Canadian). Of those 11, I’d say that five (Gael Garcia Bernal, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Rodrigo de la Serna, Regina King and Sophie Okonedo) are pretty long long-shots and three (Kerry Washington, Sandra Oh and Irma P. Hall) don’t have a chance in hell (which isn’t a comment on the quality of their performances, just their odds of being nominated). Without any early word on Million Dollar Baby, it’s hard to know how to classify Morgan Freeman, though with a weak Supporting Actor race, I wouldn’t bet against him. That leaves just two (Jamie Foxx and Don Cheadle) as legitimate contenders in my mind, with only Foxx as a lock.

Last year, EW’s list was even less diverse. Out of 74 total actors noted, there were just five non-Caucasians (one half-Indian, one half-Maori, one Puerto-Rican, one African and finally one of African-American, Jamaican, English, German, French, Dutch, Syrian and Lebanese descents). Amazingly, of these five, four actually went on to be nominated – and I don’t think anyone would blame racism for Wentworth Miller’s omission. Four out of five is a much better ratio than the 16 out of 69 Caucasians who made the cut.

For further evidence that it’s the dearth of quality roles at fault and not the voting patterns of The Academy, look at the performances nominated for NAACP Image Awards over the years, and ask if those roles in those movies would have had a better shot at getting nominated for an Academy Award if they’d been played by white people? Even Meryl Streep would have a hard time getting a nom for Deliver Us From Eva or Juwanna Mann. That may sound flippant, but the fact that these are the best roles minorities can get in Hollywood is indicative of a greater problem. The Image Awards are unfortunately forced to reward embarrassing action movies and mediocre comedies because those are the genres where African-Americans (who aren’t Denzel Washington) are most bankable.

I’m not sure how to fix this problem, but I do know that calling The Academy’s voting racist isn’t the solution. I also think that focusing on the ethnicity of the nominees (as I’ve done throughout this column) is an insult to nominees of all colors as well as the Academy Awards themselves. It’s why I was offended by Halle Berry’s acceptance speech a few years ago. I understood that it was momentous and I was moved by her genuine emotions, but she made it sound as though up until that point, every woman who had won that award was only the Best White Actress – as though if Sissy Spacek had won instead, it would’ve only been because she was white. In addition, she made it sound as though she was being rewarded for something other than her performance in Monster’s Ball, which I thought demeaned her own achievement, as well as that of her fellow nominees. And though we all know that factors outside of an actor’s performance (their likeability, if they were “robbed” the year before, their body of work, their health) contribute to voting, it seems in poor taste to acknowledge that while accepting the statue. I know I was in the minority on this one. Maybe as a white male, I just couldn’t understand. Or maybe as a writer, I was just bothered that with all the people she thanked, she neglected the writers who provided her the Oscar-baiting role.