The latest goofy outrage fuelled by The Guardian and Huffington Post zilches has been aimed at the 2015 Oscar nominations, and the lack of black nominees in any of the major categories.
That’s right, 2015 was the year that the Academy decided it was going to be racist. It wasn't the case in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 or 2014, but this year, they decided it was whitey’s time to shine. Let’s just forget Jamie Foxx, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Gabourey Sidibe, Viola Davis, Quvenzhane Wallis, Djimon Hounso, Eddie Murphy, Barkhad Abbdi, Taraji Henson, Mo’Nique, Octavia Spencer, Lupita Nyong'o, Sharen Davis, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen, Karolyn Ali, TJ Martin, Roger Ross Williams, Siedah Garret, Jamal Joseph, Pharrell Williams, Common, John Legend, Broderick Johnson, Reginald Hudlin, Oprah Winfrey, Willie D Burton, Geoffrey Fletcher, John Ridley and James Earl Jones getting nominated in the last ten years alone. The Academy decided that no black actors were worthy of nomination this year, and it can only be a result of their skin colour.
I genuinely wouldn’t have noticed that there were no black nominees this year. Just as I didn’t think that any of the nominees listed above were ‘black’ nominees. It wasn’t until conducting a thorough Google search to put that list together that I’ve ever seen all those names in one place. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t need an awards ceremony to let me know that black people are in fact as good as white people. It reeks of David Brent talking up Sidney Poitier to impress his black colleague. I wouldn’t have thought that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar unless every single article that wrote about her win was telling me so. So you’re telling me she has a vagina and she can do things that men can do? Incredible!
The assholes that constantly label Bigelow a female filmmaker, or those that address Denzel Washington or Chiwetel Ejiofor as black actors are actually the ones causing the racial divide by consistently highlighting that there are differences between races. I don’t need a ridiculous awards ceremony to act as my moral compass. I am happy to call Spike Lee a film-school hack without the fear of being scarred with a scarlet letter ‘R’, when it comes to achievement, race doesn’t even come close to entering my thought process.
Ellen DeGeneres at last year's Oscars.
Filmmakers must get infuriated when pigeonholed into their gender or race constantly by interviewers. The same thing happens in politics, when female MPs are regularly asked about ‘women’s’ issues’, with the implication that the budget, NHS, war, international relations and every other large-scale issue are reserved especially for men. In their attempts to appear liberal and at-ease with talking about race, the practice of constantly marginalizing people’s artistic endeavors is far more divisive, and ultimately, far more racist.
It’s a guilty, paternalistic attitude that has replaced the cross-burning, hood-wearing explicit racism of days gone by. It’s the attitude that implicitly screams out that black people can’t possibly be judged on their talent alone, so we must constantly point out their race and ensure they are judged not on the content of their character, but on the colour of their skin.
Since when has the Oscars got anything right anyway? They shafted Scorsese for years before his token award for The Departed. They never saw fit to give acting awards to Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Edward G. Robinson, or Best Director statues to David Lynch, Terence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, Howard Hawks, Chaplin, Sergio Leone, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Otto Preminger, Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Fritz Lang, Kurosawa, Fellini, Peckinpah and countless others. But Steven fucking Spielberg has two.
I’m not even saying that the Academy isn’t racist. Maybe they are. Maybe they are the last bastion of white supremacists with any authority left in America. Who knows? But the point is, it is insane to assume they are, simply because they didn’t see fit to nominate any black actors or directors this year. America is 80% white, and Europe nearer 95% - logic alone tells you that nominees are likely to be more white than any other race.
When discussing this nonsense on Facebook recently, I was confronted by a comment that does more to prove my point than anything I could write myself. In response to my saying that perhaps the nominees were judged on their merit rather than race, I was told by one guilty white-Knight: “Shock, white male doesn’t think institutionalised racism exists.” And that’s my point. People are so blinded by their efforts to appear as liberal, free-thinking harmonious jizzbags that they don’t realise that they are the ones perpetuating divisive racial feelings.
Of course, I can only apologise that my white skin colour renders my opinion so irrelevant in this matter.
The 87th Academy Awards takes place on Sunday 22 February 2015.
The Oscars' website
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