Here is the best joke I have ever heard about Hollywood: that the Motion Picture Academy is racist — anti-black racist — because none of the nominees for best actor or actress this year is black.
Your humble servant has worked in Hollywood, movies and TV, for forty years, man and boy, writer, producer, actor. In all of that time, on sets, in dressing rooms, in story conference rooms, in the offices of the mighty and rich, in the hallowed dining rooms of Morton’s on Melrose, RIP, I have never heard one racist remark from anyone. Not anyone, high or low. Not one syllable.
The endless quest of everyone in Hollywood is to be as pro-black, as Politically Correct when it comes to blacks as humanly possible.
If at all possible in today’s movies, despite all data to the contrary, the hero of a crime show or movie will be black and the villain will be white. There is in fact at this point basically no such thing as an African-American villain in a Hollywood product. (There may be a tiny few exceptions.)
The TV screen and the movie screen are overflowing with black actors, especially these days in commercials, but also in movies. The black actor in the recent Star Wars had no important role to play except to be black in a blockbuster film.
The Academy has recognized black performers not once but many times. They should. My experience is that black men and women are at least as good at acting as white actors. If there were great black actors, the Academy would have bent over backwards to recognize them. To say otherwise displays a TOTAL lack of knowledge of who runs Hollywood.
Why don’t the nominees look like America? What does that even mean? The point is to recognize talent, not demographics. There weren’t many Hispanic or Asian actors listed either. The demand that mere population be recognized instead of talent would be more apropos for locating fast food restaurants than recognizing acting talent.
To demand that voting power in the nation control awards for talent is a long step towards dictatorship of the nation by racial threat. It’s just plain foolishness. To mark the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth — a man who died to get blacks the right to vote — by sulking and pouting and making threats to demand gold plated statuettes awarded to men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns is pathetic.
“History repeats itself,” said Marx. “The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce.”
Enough said.