Disabled in Oscar spotlight
Right down to its production design, the Academy Awards have not always felt like the most welcoming place for the disabled. “I’ve always seen that stage with its stairs as a symbol that they don’t expect people who had mobility issues to be nominated or to win an award,” said Jim LeBrecht, the codirector and co-star of the Oscarnominated documentary Crip Camp. “It’s always been this kind of negative tacit statement.”
This year shows signs of change. LeBrecht, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, will attend the April 25 ceremony. So will Robert Tarango, the deaf-blind star of the nominated short Feeling Through.
The victors’ podium will be accessible for both. And LeBrecht hopes that will become a permanent change, both literally and figuratively.
The two films, along with Sound of Metal, nominated for six awards including best picture, have the people behind them hoping their Oscar moment can become a catalyst for Hollywood to stop using the disabled as sources of inspiration, objects of pity, or twisted villains.
“I think that the goal is to alleviate the fear,” Tarango said through a translator, “to open the doors so that executives don’t look at our ability to hear or not to hear and to see that somebody who is blind, deaf-blind, who has any kind of disability is just part of the world and can be part of these films.”
The academy, under pressure, has pushed for greater race and gender inclusion in recent years. The disabled can too often be forgotten in that discussion.
“It’s time that people need to recognise that diversity should include the disabled, the deaf-blind and the deaf community,” Marlee Matlin, an executive producer on Feeling Through and the only deaf actor to win an Oscar, for Children of a Lesser God in 1987, said through a translator. “I hope that it’s not just the flavour of the year, that it goes beyond, and that this is a trend that will continue.”
Traditionally in Oscar-nominated movies, disabled people appear only when an actor seeking an awardworthy role plays one on screen.
That has led some disabled people to feel like “they’re stealing our stories”, said LeBrecht, a sound designer whose friend, documentary director Nicole Newnham, asked that he direct Crip Camp with her. She wanted a disability-led perspective after he suggested she make a documentary about his summer camp and its essential role in the birth of the disability rights movement.
“If we just realise that the stories around disabilities aren’t just about overcoming adversity or tragedy,” he said, “then I think we could see kind of the beginning of a golden age where finally people with disabilities show their true lives, their real life experiences.”
The disabled have long been among the least represented groups in film and television. Last year, USC Annenberg’s annual inequality report found only 2.3 per cent of all speaking characters in 2019’s 100 top-grossing films were depicted with a disability, much less played by a disabled actor.
Feeling Through director Doug Roland called statistics like that “abysmal”, but said his determination to cast a deaf-blind actor in his film, which is based on a real chance encounter he had on the street, was not made from any sense of inclusion.
“We bring a culture to this,” Tarango said. “We bring our independence that people don’t often see. I was excited, excited and grateful honestly to Doug for picking someone who was deaf-blind, because I think that has helped in the success of the film.” — AP