Oscars so divided: hollyWood still struggles With race
LOS ANGELES: On their way to this year’s Oscars, Dev Patel searched for his Indian roots, Denzel Washington wrestled with racism as an angry African-American patriarch and Octavia Spencer became a top black female mathematician. With seven nominations for actors and actresses of colour, the Oscars this year have been touted as an improvement on diversity after two years of #OscarsSoWhite criticism. Yet critics say the real test will be when the movie industry, like television, casts more actors of colour in roles that are not defined by their race.“It can get burdensome possibly to actors (of colour) to play characters where the main storyline is about race, as opposed to just being a person going through a divorce or something similar,” said Victoria Thomas, casting director of best picture Oscar nominee Hidden Figures. To be sure, some of this year’s crop of Oscar hopefuls have found success in colour-blind roles. Washington was Oscar-nominated for playing an alcoholic airline pilot in 2012’s Flight; Moonlight supporting actress Naomie Harris was cast as Miss Moneypenny in James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre; and Fences star Viola Davis won an Emmy for playing a hard-bitten criminal lawyer in the TV series How to Get Away with Murder. Yet in the 89-year history of the Oscars, nearly all black actors who have won Academy Awards have done so for playing black characters. This year’s lineup is no exception, although films like Moonlight, Fences and Hidden Figures tell black stories outside the themes of slavery and civil rights that in the past most attracted awards attention. Washington and Davis star in the screen adaptation of African-American playwright August Wilson’s Fences.
Meanwhile, Moonlight, the coming-of-age story about a black boy struggling with his sexuality, is a character that “would never have been seen in the past, and certainly not nominated for Oscars,” said Darnell Hunt, author of a University of California Los Angeles annual report on Hollywood and diversity. “Sometimes, we want our narratives and our experiences to be told, and that’s what we get in Moonlight and Fences.” Oscar best picture favorite La La Land features a largely white cast even though it is set in multiracial Los Angeles and is the story of a struggling actress (Emma Stone) and a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling). The other best picture contenders— Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, Manchester by the Sea and Hell or High Water— also have majority white casts.