Hollywood babble-on

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2002 by Kaplan, Erin Aubry

It is still a bit too much to take in. After 74 years of being accused of systematically locking Blacks out of its upper echelon, epitomized by the (overwhelmingly white) cast of Academy Award winners coronated each year, the film industry did an about-face on March 24. It gave two of its most prestigious prizes, best actor and best actress, to Denzel Washington, for Training Day, and Halle Berry, for Monster's Ball.

It was a banner year for major Black nominations. Will Smith, lest we forget, was competing with Denzel in the best-actor category for his turn in Ali. Trailblazing thespian Sidney Poitier received an honorary award for lifetime achievement, setting the stage for the Halle-Denzel coup that tacked a fairy-tale ending onto an awards ceremony that began rather somberly with invocations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and laments of innocence lost. In four short hours, Hollywood had orchestrated the ultimate unlikely story and was clearly proud of itself; the famously blase Los Angeles Times nearly got religion with a headline that ran above one of several post-Oscar articles: "A Change Has Come."

Has it?

For many Blacks who have serious reservations about Hollywood's good intentions, the jury is still out. Commentaries that ran before and after the Oscars congratulated the history-making honorees but cautioned against reading too much into the Academy Awards, period; diversity, they point out, has yet to infiltrate the ranks of camera operators, directors, studio executives and scores of others who create viable opportunities for actors and really make the movie business tick.

"This year's Academy Awards may make people pay attention to Black actors, but actors are really a small part of the whole thing," says Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. "The Oscar show was a momentous evening just for sheer symbolism, but the Oscars themselves aren't based on merit. They're not objective. They're public relations for the industry. They bolster the industry and give people something to talk about."

In all the triumphal talk, not much is said of the uncomfortable racial particulars of Washington and Berry's winning roles. Washington played an unrepentant gangsta-like cop in Training Day, Berry a lusty, working-poor widow who becomes inexplicably enamored of a racist white prison guard in Monster's Ball. The stereotypes, regardless of the merits of their individual performances, are unavoidable, and beg serious questions about what Hollywood considers progress, and which Black images it chooses to reward. Any misgivings Blacks may have had about these subtler issues have so far been lost in the bright lights of the Oscars, which Boyd calls a mistake.

"Monster's Ball was a klansman's...dream - the guy got to be a racist and sleep with the Black woman," he says bluntly. "Denzel gave a great performance in a mediocre movie in which he essentially played the 'nigger,' which, after a lot more buttoned-up roles, people were apparently happy to see."

But Boyd allows that the bottom line for Blacks is building on the clout, artistically and otherwise, that the 2002 Academy Awards suggests they may finally have.

"Time will tell," Boyd says. "If in 30 years nothing's happened and we're doing this again, giving out two Oscars in a night, it won't mean anything."

- Erin Aubry Kaplan is a columnist and staff writer at LA Weekly.