Ken Berwitz
Hollywood and pandering. Perfect together.
Stung by the fact that academy members, for two years now, have not nominated any Black actors and actresses for major awards, Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs released this statement:
“I\’d like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year\’s nominees,” she said. “While we celebrate their extraordinary achievements, I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it\’s time for big changes.
“The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership. In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond,” Boone Isaacs said in what amounted to a rare and unusual move on the part of the Academy.
“As many of you know,” she continued, “we have implemented changes to diversify our membership in the last four years. But the change is not coming as fast as we would like. We need to do more, and better and more quickly.”
What is Ms. Isaacs really saying?
The way it reads to me, is:
“The Academy is being accused of racism. And that scares the bejeezus out of us, because no matter whether the accusation is true or not, once you\’re called a racist you are forever tagged with it. You are comparable to the ku klux klan, aryan nation groups and (triple gasp!!!!!) Republicans. God in heaven, we can\’t have that happen.
“So I am going to conveniently forget the fact that nominations are made by a vote of our over 7,000 members, who have not only nominated Black actors and actresses in the past but awarded them Oscars – using exactly the same criteria in the past two years that they used all those other times.
“I am going to pretend that the reason there were no Black nominees in the past two years was not because no Black actors or actresses were considered to be among the top five in their performances; it was only because the organization I head is just not diverse enough.
“I am also going to ignore the fact that everyone will understand this to mean “the fix is in” and, from now on, there are damn well going to be Black nominees every year, no matter how much the academy has to stack the deck to get them in there”.
“And I am going to ignore the fact that this will inherently put an asterisk next to all subsequent Black Oscar nominees and winners, regardless of how deserving they are: \’Was it because he/she was the best, or because the only thing that mattered was that he/she was Black?\'”
How sad that is. How counterproductive..
I wish some of the Black actors and actresses who have been nominated for Oscars, and who have won them, would speak out about this. There are plenty to choose from. But, to do that, might forever alienate them from other Black performers, and the Hollywood left-uber-alles crowd, which will happily jump on this “cause” because it looks good in the trades and on social media.
All this does is cheapen the Oscars in general, and any Black Oscar nominee/winner in particular.
Pathetic.
