A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
When the Academy Awards ceremony airs on Feb. 28, there will definitely be one hashtag dominating your twitter feed during the broadcast: #OscarsSoWhite.
As a result, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has proposed expanding its membership to become more inclusive. And the lack of quality roles for people of color has provoked others to look at the kinds of movies and parts that non-white actors are offered.
One of those stories is “#OscarsSoWhite: Why Black Films Have to Be About MLK and White Movies Can Be About a Mop Inventor.” The Frame's John Horn spoke with the author of the story, Marc Bernardin, a senior editor at The Hollywood Reporter.
You started your essay with a series of questions: Where is the black "Revenant"? Or the Latino "The Kids Are All Right"? Or the Asian "Black Swan"? These are hypothetical questions, but I assume the answers are hard to come by?
They are hard to come by, and sort of frustratingly easy to come by — the idea being that Hollywood does not see the profit to be made because Hollywood is a business. It's always a business, even the Oscars are a business, even the movies that are nominated for Oscars are a business.
They want to be sure that at the end of the day they can make their money back, and they don't think — in a frustratingly myopic point-of-view — that a movie like "The Kids Are All Right" with a Latino cast would make that money back, despite the fact that the Latino population in America is huge and the overseas audience has proven to be okay with seeing people of color that don't necessarily have giant robots or huge amount of guns.
There's also an idea that a movie with a certain type of actor has to look a certain way. You did a roundtable with Stephanie Allain, who's a black veteran producer, "Master of None" show runner Alan Yang, and Justin Simien, who's the writer and director of "Dear White People." Simien said in your conversation: "There is an obsession with black tragedy. If you see a black movie, it's typically historical and it tends to deal with our pain." So what is Justin Simien talking about there?
I think he's talking mostly about movies about struggle. He's talking about people like Jackie Robinson or people like Solomon Northup or even James Brown. It's seeing what a person has to endure in order to triumph. I mean, "12 Years a Slave" is the most obvious example of that. You're just going to see this man suffer for 12 years and yes, it's easy to use a film like that to assuage whatever guilt that might be subconscious about white America's view on black America.
We recently had the improv comedians who are called "The Black Version" in studio and they raised that exact point regarding the types of characters any African-American actor is offered. It tends to be a part that's written very narrowly and defined by race, that it's not a race-neutral part. Is that another part of the same issue?
It is and it isn't. The days when people were offered Denzel Washington movies simply because it was Denzel ... you know, "The Pelican Brief" was not written for him to be African-American. It was just written to for him to be that character. You know, Will Smith was that guy for a while. "I Am Legend" was not written for a black guy, but we'll happily take Will Smith if we can get that to be that black guy.
When you look at scripts that actors will see, the sort of coded language on the pages of the scripts are always that black characters are called out as black characters and [for] everybody else, race is not a factor. So you're subconsciously drawn to, This is who they want me to be, not They're willing to see me as any of these people.
You've probably gotten a fair amount of reaction to what you wrote. Certainly we've been talking endlessly on this show and the media have been focusing very closely to the Oscars-all-white nominations for the second year in a row. What has to change for us to not have this conversation a year or five years from now.
Well, part of the problem is that this conversation came through the Oscars, the Oscars was the touchstone for it, and the Oscars is the end of this particular train: Here are all the movies that came out, let's look at them. As opposed to starting at the beginning of that train, which is, Here are the 50 movies that Hollywood is going to make this year. Who are they about? Change has to begin at the beginning of this story and not at the end of it.
The Academy Awards air on Feb. 28.