Blitz: A Review - Bombs Away!

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ill-conceived, poorly executed and outrageously awful movie.

If you’re yearning for a story about Nazi Germany’s brutal blitzkrieg bombing assault on London during World War II that is so pretentious and preposterous that it will have you rooting for the bad guys to go full on Enola Gay and Hiroshima the Brits into oblivion…have I got the movie for you.

Blitz, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Steve McQueen, tells the story of George, a young mixed-race boy, and his single white mother, Rita, who try to survive the chaos and calamity of the Blitz.

My wee Scottish grandmother, one of my all-time favorite people, lived in London during the Blitz and when I was a child would tell me stories of frantically running to the underground with her two horrified toddlers and one wailing infant (my uncles) in tow in order to survive the German bombing raids.

Her harrowing experience had me deeply interested in watching Blitz. As did the fact that one of my favorite actresses, Saoirse Ronan, stars in it, and that the film’s writer/director, Steve McQueen, was a once upon a time a filmmaker I revered for his artistic courage and vision.

Then I sat down and watched Blitz – which is streaming on Apple TV+…and holy shit balls is it egregiously, atrociously bad.

This movie is so ill-conceived, poorly designed, erroneously executed, didactic, patronizing, pedantic and pedestrian that it left me frustrated to the point of being furious. It is difficult to put into words how much I hated this movie…but I’ll try because I truly and absolutely despised it.

The film, which runs two-hours, makes the ludicrous decision to make the story of the Blitz, a terror bombing which killed 40,000 Brits – the overwhelming majority (literally 99%) of whom were white, about a little black-skinned boy suffering a bevy of racist micro-aggressions while on an odyssey through London. I shit you not.

It would be hard to misunderstand and misrepresent the meaning of the Blitz more than to use it as a weapon to bash the very people it brutalized. This movie is the equivalent of telling a story about the Holocaust and having it focus on a mixed-race Polish kid in Krakow bemoaning the Jewish racism he endured at the hands of the Jews being forced into the ghetto and onto the trains headed to Auschwitz.

The film’s pretentiousness and its patronizing tone are astonishing, and seemed designed to please a particularly putrid audience from our recent past.

This is one of those films that vacuous liberal white people would’ve exalted in the most glowing terms back in 2019, no doubt during breaks at their book club meetings where they self-righteously discussed the brilliance of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist and lamented how everyone else besides them is so racist.

This is the type of movie where the white people are almost unanimously atrocious and despicable villains, and minorities, be they Indian, Jewish or African, are noble saints with hearts of gold.

The heart of gold lineup includes but is not limited to…the Jew with a heart of gold who stands up to defend an Indian family – who also have hearts of gold. There’s a Nigerian nightwatchman with a heart so golden he is essentially Jesus Christ. Then there’s a communist midget…again I shit you not…with a heart of gold considerably bigger than his tiny little body. There’s also a black woman who is a criminal but she too ends up having, you guessed it…a heart of gold!

The Anglo-Saxon/white Brits on the other hand…well, they are, with the exception of Rita and her father, a vile, vindictive, violent, vicious and venomous bunch. Whether it’s the street criminal Albert, who seems like something out of a second-rate Dickens novel, or the bevy of pale civil servants tasked with public safety, or the white men in various positions of power, the white characters are a cruel and heartless bunch, that lie easily and incessantly. They are all filled to the brim with a savage and irrational hate for anyone not white that burns brighter and hotter than any Nazi fire bombing.

On top of the incomparably trite and passe agenda fueling the film, there’s the issue of the plot being so ludicrous and preposterous as to be incandescently stupid.

George’s odyssey is essentially like Pinocchio’s, as he goes from one inanity to the next, making awful, idiotic decisions every chance he gets. But, of course, because George is of mixed-race, he has a heart of gold and is outlandishly courageous and brave, while the white kids are just cruel and mean-spirited.

George’s odyssey is the main narrative in the film, and it is incessantly nonsensical and moronic. Elliot Heffernan, who plays George, is a stone-faced dullard who does nothing but grate and irritate viewers every second he’s on-screen. I’ve never wished for a child to be killed in a movie before…but this dope had me rooting for it.

The more interesting, but equally inane, narrative, is that of George’s mom, Rita. I love Saoirse Ronan, and she does the best she can with what’s she’s given, but Rita’s story, which is filled with a bevy of lifeless flashbacks, is so vapid it made my teeth hurt.  And, of course, it is filled with a cavalcade of loathsome white men and their unending racism and sexism and the like. Yawn.

Steve McQueen was once a filmmaker I deeply respected and admired. His first feature, Hunger (2008), which chronicles the struggle of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, is a masterful, exquisitely executed, immensely moving film. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

His next film, Shame (2011), is a shocking, vivid depiction of the chaotic life of a sex addict that is also well-crafted.  

His third film, 12 Years a Slave (2013), won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It is a bit of a controversial pick in hindsight because apparently making slave movies is a no-no among the DEI sect nowadays. But back then, it was an impressive film that was very deftly put together, and I loved it then…and still do today.

Then things started to go off the rails for McQueen. His next movie, Widows (2018), was, frankly, a mess of a movie. It tried, and failed, to say a lot of things about a lot of subjects, and generally ended up being politically flaccid, dramatically incoherent and cinematically impotent.

Which brings us to Blitz. Blitz is proof of something that makes me quite unhappy, namely that Steve McQueen is not the noteworthy filmmaker I wished him to be, but rather a painfully pedestrian and banal artistic poseur devoid of any truly compelling or original vision.

The reality is that the brilliant Steve McQueen of Hunger is dead and buried, and all we have left is the man who made Blitz, a cloying, trite and treacly film that feels like a sub-par parody of one of those racially-motivated and quickly forgotten BBC movies of the week.

The bottom line is that Blitz is an embarrassingly bad, painfully pretentious and preposterous film that I cannot recommend to anyone at any time. This movie is an abject failure in every way and, like the vast majority of the films of Apple TV+, is a complete and total waste of time. Skip it…I know I wish I had.

©2024

American Fiction: A Review - My Pafology Lives in Da Ghetto

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever and insightful comedy about racial pandering and virtue signaling that winks and nods as it panders and signals its own virtue.

American Fiction, written and directed by Cord Jefferson, tells the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a struggling black author who out of frustration with the publishing industry, writes an absurdly stereotypical “black” book which becomes an instant best-seller.

American Fiction, which is based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, is one of those multi-layered movies that is sneaky good. On its surface, which features a curmudgeonly yet charming performance from Jeffrey Wright, it is an entertaining, if a bit scattered, movie that just about anybody could watch and enjoy. But just beneath the film’s friendly surface it seethes with an undeniably dynamic cultural political message.

The film follows the travails of Wright’s character “Monk” Ellison, who is a professor in Los Angeles and an author. His high-minded books don’t sell well and his latest is passed over by publishers. The literary world is enamored with books about racial issues and Monk’s book is deemed not “black enough” by the white people running the business.

A dejected Monk then takes a sabbatical from teaching in order to visit his family in Massachusetts. His mother is elderly and suffering from dementia, his newly divorced sister Lisa is frustrated and sad and his long-lost brother Cliff is divorced and newly gay.

It is as Monk navigates this chaotic family drama that he writes his undeniably “black” book My Pafology, under the pseudonym Stag R. Leigh, about growing up in the hood and being in and out of prison - things that are the polar opposite to Monk’s actual life. Monk’s agent submits the book and publishers absolutely love it and it becomes a million-dollar sensation.

That whole story is engaging and entertaining enough. Yes, the film can be a bit too unfocused and run a bit too long, but anytime you get to spend a few hours with Jeffrey Wright it is usually worthwhile, and American Fiction is no exception.

The curious, and most interesting thing about American Fiction though is not its surface but its subtext. It is a movie about white liberal pandering on race issues that itself shamelessly panders on cultural issues.

For example, Monk’s brother Cliff is a blatant and bad caricature of a gay man and his entire story is at best superfluous, but he, and his gay friends, conveniently check a lot of feel-good diversity boxes.

Another example is Monk’s sister Lisa, who is a doctor. But she’s not just any doctor, she’s an abortion doctor, who must have armed guards at her clinic…again…the movie is signaling its virtue and declaring its bona fides to its target audience of liberals, who will probably be blissfully unaware of both the pandering in plain sight and the fact that that they are the target of the film’s meta-joke.

The movie rightfully makes fun of the pathetic white liberals in the publishing industry to great effect, but the deeper laughs, whether intentionally or not, come from the comedy hiding in plain sight in the form of the film’s own pandering.

I mean, making a movie about cultural pandering, which features a movie within a movie, both of which relentlessly pander, is brilliant. Maybe all of that is not intentional, maybe it’s just a giant blind spot by filmmaker Cord Jefferson…but I’d like to credit him for his brilliance than assume it was all by accident.

That said, the film does avoid the much deeper, and pardon the pun, darker issues regarding the negative stereotypes perpetuated and celebrated in American culture. Yes, powerful white people certainly do push certain harmful types of entertainment that denigrate black people - but which black people also embrace. But it’s a very specific type of “white person”, the type who has the controls to the machinery to spread that message and make it culturally universal and celebrated.

Also avoided is the fact that the intelligence community in the U.S., most notably the CIA, have for decades been funding psy-ops that elevate the negative and violent stereotypes of blacks through mass media - which in turns feeds violence in black neighborhoods and communities. For example, the CIA were heavily involved in the birth and dissemination of rap music, most notably gangsta rap. Combined with the intelligence community flooding majority black inner city neighborhoods with drugs and guns (see the late Gary Webb’s reporting on this issue, and the late Michael Ruppert’s claims as well), this makes it quite obvious that it isn’t just pandering, virtue signaling white liberals who want to perpetuate the stereotypes of the violent “black experience”, but it is rather powerful people much higher on the food chain who have very nefarious intentions. Regardless, none of these topics are broached in American Fiction, which is not surprising, but is worth noting.

As for what is in the movie, the very best thing about American Fiction is Jeffrey Wright. Wright is a subtle and skilled actor who never does too much or forces you to watch how much he is acting. As Monk, Wright is funny and ferocious, while never falling into caricature…except when he is expressly trying to be a caricature.

Sterling K. Brown gives an energetic performance as Monk’s brother Cliff. The character doesn’t seem like an actual human being, but to Brown’s credit he sinks his teeth into the role and mines it for some quality laughs.

Both Wright and Brown are nominated for Academy Awards, for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively, their first ever nominations. I didn’t think Brown’s work was worthy of such recognition, but Wright’s most certainly is, as his performance is masterfully rendered.

Director Cord Jefferson, who is also nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, comes from a writing background, as he’s been working in television for the last decade as a writer.

American Fiction is Jefferson’s first feature film and directorial debut. He obviously has an incisive and insightful sense of humor which works well on many levels in the film. That said, American Fiction is visually as rudimentary as it gets and it looks pretty flat, just like a generic tv show.

The bottom line regarding American Fiction is that it is definitely well worth watching. It has the entertaining surface of a funny HBO tv show combined with a sub-text bursting with cutting social commentary. Throw in a winning Jeffrey Wright performance and you really can’t go wrong choosing American Fiction.

American Fiction is currently only available in theatres, and I’m not sure when it’ll be coming to streaming. If you want to have a fun night out then you could do worse than see American Fiction in theatres, although due to its rather basic cinematography, it is not essential to see it on the big screen. My recommendation is that you can wait until it hits streaming but when it does you should definitely check it out because it’s a smart, funny and entertaining piece of work.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024  

ESPN's Corrosive Race Baiting

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 31 seconds

ESPN is addicted to a false racial narrative and it blinds them to basic facts.

Like the rest of the establishment media, the sports network’s obsession with race obliterates whatever was left of their credibility.

This past week two black ESPN on-air personalities made asses of themselves when they vomited out onto the public race-based nonsense devoid of any grounding in fact, which has become commonplace at the network.

On Wednesday, after it was announced the Boston Celtics were hiring Ime Udoka, a black man, as their next head coach, black ESPN basketball analyst Jay Williams, tweeted out “The first head coach of color for the celtics…& even more importantly…he is one talented individual who has paid his dues.”

Williams no doubt thought he was being a social justice stalwart with his edgy tweet, the problem was that he was egregiously wrong. The Celtics have not only had five black head coaches prior to Udona, the franchise was the first in NBA history to hire a black head coach, the great Bill Russell in 1966. Russell, KC Jones and Doc Rivers were all black Celtic coaches who won NBA titles leading the team, with Rivers doing so just 12 years ago.

Williams was called out on twitter for his error and in response claimed that he didn’t write the tweet. Maybe the culprits are the same mysterious, elusive and imaginary Russian hackers who wrote homophobic rants on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog those many years ago.

The other race-based bit of jackassery came from black NBA analyst Jalen Rose, who, when it was reported that white player Kevin Love was going to be a member of the USA Olympic basketball team, called his inclusion “tokenism” and a result of USA basketball not wanting to send an all-black team to the Olympics.

Of course, this assertion is utterly absurd as four of the last five USA basketball teams have been all black, and since 1996, only two white players, John Stockton and Kevin Love, have made the USA basketball team at all.

Williams and Rose are just marching in lockstep when it comes to pushing a racial narrative. Last year, black ESPN superstar Stephen A. Smith, the most bombastic bloviating blowhard buffoon in sports television, ranted after the Brooklyn Nets hired former two-time MVP Steve Nash, a white man, to be the head coach even though Nash had no coaching experience, that it was a function of “white privilege” and that “this does not happen for a black man”.

Once again, this was a racial narrative directly at odds with facts. Not only had black players with no coaching experience been hired by teams before, but it happened in Stephen A. Smith’s hometown of New York, when in 2013 the Nets hired Jason Kidd and in 2014 the Knicks hired Derek Fisher.

A brief glimpse of ESPN’s plethora of ‘debate’ shows like Pardon the Interruption or Around the Horn too reveals a fierce commitment to NOT debate topics but rather congratulate each other on social justice bona fides.

Even the coverage of actual sporting events is now marinated in racial and political narratives. I will never forget the absurdity of watching black side line reporter Malika Andrews doing a post-game report from the NBA bubble last summer on Scott Van Pelt’s late-night show. Andrews weeping as she claims she “prided herself on being objective” but it’s so clear the “system of objectivity in journalism is so white-washed”, and then wailing the asinine assumption that she could have been Breonna Taylor – the 26 year old killed by Louisville police in a raid where Taylor’s boyfriend fired on officers. Andrews’ unprofessionally blubbering “that could have been me” while Van Pelt soothed her paranoid delusions was the lowlight of a year of journalistic lowlights on the network.

This blatant pushing of biased and baseless race-based narratives is not only tolerated but mandated at the self-proclaimed world-wide leader in sports and its parent company, Disney, the wokest place on earth.

Williams, Rose, Smith, Andrews and the rest of ESPN talking heads pushing their racial nonsense are obviously willing to trade their credibility for a bit of social status and to kiss up to their corporate overlords. This is an annoyance to sports fans but let’s be honest, sport’s journalists without credibility are like clowns without dignity.

None of this is too surprising as this is what happens in a racial moral panic – and we are definitely in a racial moral panic, where people lose their minds, feelings override facts and narrative trumps truth.

This is how a collection of medical and scientific professionals sign a letter saying gathering in large groups during Covid is deadly – unless it’s to attend a Black Lives Matter protest. And how riots were deemed “mostly peaceful protests”. And how the lab leak theory became verboten in the establishment media because it was somehow anti-Asian. And how sharp increases in black on Asian violence was deemed a result of “white supremacy”.

From the 9-11 charade to the Iraq War/WMD fiasco to the financial collapse of 2007-2008 to the Covid calamity and the current racial hysteria, the establishment in America has, across the board, worked extremely hard to eviscerate its own credibility by egregiously obfuscating the truth and blatantly pushing their preferred, but fictional, narratives.

ESPN and the rest of the establishment media may bask in their current myopic decision to push racial propaganda instead of truth, but reality has a funny way of eventually asserting itself, and when it does, the whirlwind these charlatans will reap will be brutal, and well deserved.

©2021

The Father and the Media's Dementia Simulation Machine

The Oscar-nominated The Father is a masterful film about living with dementia…and a reminder that the mainstream media is a dementia simulation machine.

The film immerses viewers in the confusion of dementia – the same sort of bewilderment caused by US media misinformation to disorient the public and make them easier to control and manipulate. 

The Father is a terrific movie that tells the story of an aging man struggling with dementia, and it has left me rattled as it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the delusional and disorienting nature of American life.  

The film is rightfully nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Academy Awards as it showcases a superb performance by Anthony Hopkins who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his stellar work.

What makes The Father such a poignant and insightful film is that director Florian Zeller doesn’t just show the effects of dementia on the screen, he immerses the audience in the excruciating experience of dementia.

Watching the film and experiencing that disease-imposed confusion, I couldn’t help but think about how, here in the U.S. at least, it feels as if our entire culture is suffering from a collective dementia. The disorientation and detachment from reality that come with that dreaded disease are entirely commonplace in America, where we seem incapable of remembering the past, or of clearly seeing the present.

This rapacious American dementia is fueled first and foremost by the mainstream media’s manipulation and misinformation.

The establishment media have long distorted reality in order to manufacture consent around a desired narrative. This is why Americans always see themselves as the “good guys” on the world stage and not as the imperialist aggressors and colonialist exploiters that we are.

For proof just look at the flag-waving coverage surrounding the Iraq war and the WMD nonsense, or the egregious media assaults on Julian Assange and Edward Snowden compared to the genuflecting coverage of infamous bs artists like Chris Kyle, George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

This duplicitous media approach can often be so blatant as to be ridiculously absurd, such as when CNN described the rioting, looting and arson last Summer as “mostly peaceful” protests.

The same is true regarding the current wave of anti-Asian violence. The media blame the attacks on the ever-expanding yet conveniently amorphous label of “white supremacy”, but the videos and statistics regarding these repugnant attacks against Asians show black people are the majority of perpetrators, a fact the media steadfastly fail to mention.

Another dementia-like distortion caused by the media is the perception that police are killing black people en-masse.

As a 2021 Skeptic Research Poll found, most Americans greatly over-estimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police.

When asked “How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”, 53.3 % of those self-described as “very liberal” estimated that over 1,000 unarmed black men had been killed by police, even though the actual number is believed to be between 60 – 100.

According to the same study, 24.9% of people killed by police are black, yet those self-describing as “liberal” or “very liberal” estimated the number to be 56% and 60% respectively.

This detachment from reality is no shock as according to a Gallup poll over half the country already over-estimates the size of the black population in general, believing it to be over 30% when in reality it is roughly 14%.

The over-estimation of police killings of unarmed black men is to be expected as every killing of a black person by the police or by a white person results in massive media coverage and a declaration that the only motivation for the incident is racism. In contrast the deaths of white people at the hands of police or by black perpetrators are not considered noteworthy.

The anti-Russia hysteria is another establishment media manufactured narrative that is directly at odds with reality, but that is deeply rooted in the American psyche.

Russiagate, hacking of electrical grids, using super-secret microwave weapons to attack U.S. diplomats, and putting bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, are just a few of the dominant pieces of anti-Russian disinformation devoid of fact that the media tout as gospel truth.

The immigration crisis is another bewildering story disorienting Americans. The media vehemently chanted the mantra “kids in cages” when Trump detained children at the border, but were silent when Obama did the exact same thing during his presidency. And now that Biden is doing it too, the media are back to downplaying its significance or ignoring it entirely.

And of course, the most perplexing media coverage surrounds the coronavirus. Originally the press excoriated anyone who raised the notion that the disease may have come from a lab in China, but now the truth that they aren’t sure where it initially came from is acknowledged.

The medical establishment is just as perfidious and deceitful as the media.

For example, Dr. Fauci knowingly lied early in the pandemic about the need for masks.

And last Summer a collection of medical professionals said that no large groups should gather, except for Black Lives Matter protests, making the obscene and absurd claim that the media manufactured “epidemic” of racism was just as bad as the coronavirus pandemic.  

In addition, concerns over vaccinations are broken down by race, with white concerns stigmatized and black concerns gently understood.

Just like dementia, this insidious media and medical duplicity creates stress, irritability and aggression among the populace.

In conclusion, The Father is a masterful film insightfully exploring the tragedy of dementia, and the hypocritical, pernicious, frivolous and mendacious establishment media are a relentless dementia simulation machine. The former is worth indulging, the latter is terminal and should be avoided at all costs.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A must-see new documentary that eviscerates the mainstream narrative on race in America and insightfully reveals the manipulations and machinations that distort modern-day race relations.

What Killed Michael Brown? is the most important documentary of the year. The film, which is exquisitely directed by Eli Steele and gloriously written and narrated by famed conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele, takes a deep dive into the tangled web of race in America through the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014.

From the get go the movie jumps out at you, not with cinematic bombast but with a subtle brilliance. The opening title sequence uses the same distinct font as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and by so doing lets viewers know it is unabashedly challenging popular myth.

This film is a searing, scintillating and staggering examination of race in America, but make no mistake, it is not some emotionalist screed or partisan polemic, it is a thoughtful, reasoned and measured commentary.

Shelby Steele, the film’s narrator, is armed with an impressive background in civil rights, a towering intellect and a monumental mastery of language, which allows him to confidently march viewers through the maze and minefield of race without ever misplacing a step.

Steele frames the American conflict over race as a battle between “poetic truth” and “objective truth”. Poetic truth is a distorted and partisan version of truth and is used by race hustlers and charlatans like Reverend Al Sharpton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, to paint Michael Brown as an innocent victim and noble martyr for the cause.

This poetic truth conflates present with the past, which results in the tragedy of Michael Brown being transformed into a continuation of slavery’s violence and Jim Crow era lynching by depraved whites.

Through this paradigm, Michael Brown becomes all black people, and all black people become Michael Brown.George Floyd

The establishment media and racial activists embrace this poetic truth because their objective is coercion, not reason.

This version of truth does two critically destructive things, it gives blacks an identity through victimization, and it gives whites a way to assuage their racial guilt.

As Steele explains in the film, “white guilt became black power”. This dynamic set up a vicious cycle where blacks use victimhood to exploit white guilt, and whites steal agency from blacks in order to assuage said guilt. Therefore the learned helplessness of blacks feeds the self-centered, narcissistic paternalism of whites and vice versa.

As Steele insightfully declares, “humans never use race except as a means to power…never an end, always a means. “ This is contrasted by the vision of Steele’s working class, minimally educated father who grew up under Jim Crow and fervently “favored character over race as a means to power.”

As seen in Ferguson in 2014 and in recent months all across America, racial anger has become ritualized and choreographed. Grievance is claimed without evidence and protest encouraged with no good faith it will lead to anything.

Whether it be Michael Brown, George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, these deaths are seen less as tragedies and more as opportunities.

The film highlights Al Sharpton as one of the more aggressive opportunists and as the epitome of the race grievance peddler. Reverend Al’s mendacious model is now used by Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who are just as intellectually and morally dubious as their duplicitous mentor.

Unlike the extraordinarily successful and morally impeccable civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which exposed its opponents as devoid of moral authority, BLM and Sharpton are themselves morally bankrupt.

As the film points out, none of these opportunists are interested in the development of black people or communities, but in “justice”, and their definition of “justice” is amorphous, ever expanding and rooted entirely in emotionalism and greed.

Steele uses the immigrant owned convenience store in Ferguson where the Michael Brown tragedy began, as proof of the absurdity of the demand for alleged “justice”.

The mob demands the store owners shut down for three days on the anniversary of Brown’s death as well as a whole host of other demands. The owners acquiesce, but it is never enough. Once one demand is fulfilled, a new and more egregious one sprouts up…until finally the mob is clamoring for the store owners to literally give away their store to protestors.

Besides the movie’s robust intellectualism, it is also exceedingly well made, and like its soulful and melancholy jazz soundtrack, never loses its pace or rhythm.

In a bizarre twist, considering the high quality filmmaking on display, Amazon first refused to allow What Killed Michael Brown? to run on its streaming service, claiming it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”.

It’s ironic that major corporations like Amazon are now emphasizing black artists but when those artists don’t toe the establishment line on race, they are told to sit at the back of the bus.

Thankfully, after much public pressure, Amazon has now relented and is allowing the film to stream for purchase on their service. But this is not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last time that mainstream gatekeepers try to silence truth tellers.

In conclusion, What Killed Michael Brown? is mandatory viewing because it is an intellectually vibrant, finely crafted piece of work that brazenly and bravely reveals the uncomfortable reality of race in America today. SEE IT NOW!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Spike Lee's 'Da 5 Bloods' is a Dreadful Disappointment, but Virtue-Signaling Establishment Critics Lack the Courage to Tell the Truth About It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

There’s only one good thing about this film: it exposes mainstream film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their pandering to fellow woke elites.

Spike Lee’s new movie, Da 5 Bloods, starring Delroy Lindo, Chadwick Boseman and Jonathan Majors, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam as old men in order to retrieve the body of their long lost comrade and search for buried treasure, premiered this past Friday on Netflix to much fanfare.

Lee has long been an artistic provocateur on issues of race, so as the U.S. once again struggles with civil unrest and social upheaval over racial injustice, you would think now would be a perfect time for a new movie from the Academy Award winner who brought us Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman.

You would be wrong.

While Da 5 Bloods does have some intriguing moments, particularly the documentary montages interspersed throughout the film, the majority of the movie is a sloppy, bloated, decadent, incoherent, endlessly meandering, melodramatic mess.

Sadly, the movie, which features a trite and derivative script, a relentlessly bombastic score and painfully amateurish action sequences, is too cinematically inept to be of any socially conscious value.

Ironically, the film’s lone insight into race relations in America is entirely unintentional as it exposes liberal film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their complete lack of professional integrity.

It is inconceivable to me that any cinematically literate person could conclude Da 5 Bloods is anything but a pronounced disappointment but, remarkably, critics have been falling all over themselves to praise the film, some even claim it is an Oscar favorite.

On the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, critics have given it a staggering 92% score.

What was striking to me about the critical fawning over the movie was that in contrast, audiences at Rotten Tomatoes scored the film a much more reasonable 62%.

A look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of other prominent films directed by black artists in recent years reveals a similarly suspicious divide between critics and audiences.

For example, in 2015 another Spike Lee film, the abysmal Chi-Raq, garnered an 82% critical score and a 50% audience score.

In 2015, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ compelling but flawed Best Picture winner received a blistering 98% critical score compared to a more rational audience score of 79%.

In 2018, the middling Black Panther somehow overcame its notable faults to become a box office smash and a Best Picture nominee while receiving an extraordinary 97% critical score compared to its more accurate audience score of 79%. The 97% critical score makes it the highest rated superhero movie of all time.

Black Panther’s negative18-point disparity between critical score and audience score is three times larger than any other superhero movie in history. 

In 2019 critics adored Barry Jenkins’ film If Beale Street Could Talk at a rate of 95% while audiences gave it a discerningly tepid 70%.

Also in 2019, critics slobbered over Jordan Peele’s confounding horror hit, Us, with a 93% score while audiences recoiled from it with a 59% rating.

The social justice warrior contingent will no doubt deduce from these numbers that the significantly lower audience scores are a result of hordes of incorrigible racists intentionally under rating a movie purely out of racial animus.

The facts betray that argument though, as other unquestionably brilliant black films, such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (92 critical/90 audience) and Malcolm X (88 critical/91 audience) as well as John Singleton’s iconic Boyz n the Hood (96 critical/93 audience), have received universal praise and are devoid of such large differences in rating.

It seems obvious to me that mainstream critics are judging current black films not on their merits but on a politically correct curve.

Maybe this biased perspective is born out of fear of being labeled a racist or a heretic in the church of wokeness if they criticize a black film, or maybe it is some sort of pandering paternalism, which in and of itself is its own pernicious form of racism.

Sadly, these critics, just like those public health officials who recently went against their own expert opinions and declared that people needed to get out and protest racism despite the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, are frighteningly quick to trade their professional and personal integrity in order to satiate the woke mob and be seen as politically correct “allies”.

Critics that judge films on a racial curve in order to signal their virtue and moral superiority are doing a great disservice to both cinema and artists of color, as neither is well served by their blatant disregard of their professionalism and their pathetic woke posturing and pandering.

In conclusion, Da 5 Bloods is an awful film but it has done a service by exposing the untrustworthy critics in the establishment media for only caring about their social status among woke elites and not giving a damn about the art of cinema.

Now, if you want to watch a worthy Spike Lee film pertinent to this tumultuous time, go watch his unadulterated masterpiece Malcolm X, or the dynamically brilliant Do the Right Thing or the uneven but insightful BlacKkKlansman…but definitely avoid the dismal Da 5 Bloods.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Thanks to the Courage of HBO Max, Racism is Now Gone With the Wind...and Frankly My Dear, I DO Give a Damn

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

 HBO Max has deemed Gone With the Wind racist and has pulled it from its service because viewers are apparently too fragile and too stupid to be allowed to watch it.

In recent weeks, as protestors carrying Black Lives Matter signs filled the streets, I have often heard it said that, “racism is a virus”. If that is true, then the new streaming service HBO Max just found the cure.

HBO Max’s simple and brutally effective treatment to eradicate racism from the world is to pull the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind from its service…for now…at least until it can bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context”. Take that racism!!

Gone With the Wind, which is based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell, won 10 Academy Awards, including, ironically enough, the first ever for an African American – Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress. The movie is also the highest grossing film of all-time (adjusted for inflation) and is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all-time.

The film’s unforgivable sin though is that it is set in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction and depicts black slaves as a happy, content and well-treated bunch that adored their benevolent white masters.

Thankfully, HBO Max’s swift action will put an end to that highly popular theory, that seems to be everywhere nowadays, which states that African-Americans were much better off during the happy-go-lucky slavery era than today.

My fervent hope is that the geniuses at HBO Max and across Hollywood will now set their sights on other famous films from the past that cross the line of wokeness and offend the delicate sensibilities of us all.

For instance, all of the Star Wars films need to be tossed onto the woke bonfire immediately for their disgusting homophobia, which manifests itself in the C3PO character, an offensive stereotype of all closeted gay robots.

And how do you think members of the Sasquatch community feel when they see Chewbacca denying his obvious Sasquatch heritage and calling himself a “Wookie”, all while speaking some guttural, primitive language and carrying a laser-shooting crossbow? Won’t someone think of the Sasquatch?

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has got to go too, as while it may be historically accurate that doesn’t matter because you just know that anti-Semites watch that thing like its Nazi porn, which is just gross, and I simply cannot abide anybody enjoying anything for the wrong reasons…or the right reasons for that matter.

While we are on the subject of Nazis, The Sound of Music feels really Nazi friendly to me too, especially since its filled with all those smiling singing white people…so into the delete bin it goes.

As a student of history I can tell you that Dr. Zhivago is about Russia…I think… and the mainstream media and Hollywood have made it clear to me that Russians and Nazis are the same thing…so torch that damn movie!

Speaking of my vast knowledge of history, the 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, needs to be exorcised from American screens immediately. Have you seen how negatively it portrays Egyptians? That seems really Islamophobic to me!

Titanic needs to be erased, not just because it has only white people in it, but because it sheds a bad light on the cruise ship industry and come on guys, corporations are people too.

Same thing goes for the Terminator franchise, which really slanders the tech industry with its negative portrayal of SkyNet. How do you think the folks in Silicon Valley feel when tech is seen as a malevolent force?

Speaking of the tech industry…in order to spare the feelings of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, if he is even capable of feeling, The Social Network needs to be banned forever and ever.

Boogie Nights really offended me personally because of its negative depiction of people with extremely large appendages, so it has got to go too!

And what about Citizen Kane? Yes, it does highlight the unconventional love between a boy and his sled, but on the other hand it really belittles the media-owning billionaire class (of which HBO Max is a member) and I just can’t abide by that…onto the bonfire it goes!

In fact, I think every film that makes anyone, anywhere, even slightly uncomfortable for any reason at all, needs to be not only banned, but all copies destroyed and the ashes then scattered to the winds. That way all hatred and prejudice of any kind will be permanently eradicated from the universe forever and ever…amen.

As for HBO Max, I think we should all take a knee in honor of their brave decision to save us from our own fragility and stupidity, and from the burden of freedom of choice, by not allowing us to watch Gone With the Wind without “context”.

The bottom line is this: where Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela all failed, HBO Max has gloriously succeeded. Racism is now definitively and irreversibly Gone With the Wind!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Covid-19 is Deadly, but It Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 16 seconds

As the ‘woke’ reaction to coronavirus has shown, even a pandemic won’t slow down the incessant political correctness of woke culture.

The coronavirus pandemic is a very scary and unsettling time for all of us. Everyone one I know is worried about their health, their finances or both.

Every cough or sniffle feels like a potential calamity and every missed paycheck and new bill coming due like the onset of economic ruin.

No one knows if or when life will get back to normal and we can resume working without fear of infection and with it the possibility of death. All of this uncertainty is extremely unnerving.

But thankfully there is something that can anchor us to our carefree, pre-coronavirus past…something persistent and reliable that, like herpes, will stick with us through thick and thin. I am, of course, referring to the idiotically self-defeating, painfully myopic and infuriatingly insipid, politically correct philosophy known as wokeness.

Like the ever-resilient cockroach surviving and thriving in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, that strain of vacuous thought known as wokeness is proving itself to be immune to the Covid-19 contagion.

In those halcyon days before the disease ravaged the U.S., the ‘woke’ narrative was that coronavirus was a human problem, not a Wuhan problem.

Social justice warriors resolutely decreed that coronavirus was not to be attached to ethnic identity and declared that blaming the disease on China or Chinese culture - with its penchant for wet markets and eating bats, was racist, and somehow a slur against Asian-Americans. Of course, only the most in-bred troglodytes believe that Asian-Americans go to wet markets and eat bats and would blame Asian people for the Chinese government’s abysmal failure.

Diminutive, two-bit hack comedian Bill Maher ran afoul of the woke brigade last weekend when he went against this specific politically correct talking point in a much-publicized, and shockingly accurate, rant on his HBO show, where he lambasted those who would deny empirical facts blaming China because it might trigger idiot racists to be racist. This quickly resulted in a cavalcade of woke panties once again getting all in a bunch.

It seems though that woke dogma is shifting now that the deadly coronavirus has spread like wildfire throughout the U.S., either that or these pandering nitwits are just brazenly and shamelessly hypocritical.

For example, the newest decree handed down by the politically correct twitterverse and vapid dopes in the mainstream media is that coronavirus is racist because it “disproportionately” effects black people.

Apparently coronavirus isn’t about identity…unless it is.

The aptly named Charles Blow of the New York Times has become the standard-bearer for this new race-infused woke storyline. Blow, like all social justice hammers that see the whole world as a white racist nail, acrobatically twists logic, the English language and statistics to fit this theory of Covid-19 as the ”Brother Killer”.

In Blow’s latest column, creatively titled “The Brother Killer”, he states that black men are particularly at-risk of coronavirus because they make up larger percentages of the vulnerable prison, homeless and poor population than their percentage of the overall U.S. population.

Blow writes “For these (black) men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre-existing social conditions as pre-existing medical ones.”

If Blow, and the rest of his woke minions, wanted to be accurate and weren’t blinded by race and flaccid identity politics, that sentence should read, “for poor people of all colors, the devastating effects of the virus are about pre-existing economic conditions.”

The calamity of the coronavirus isn’t about black men in prison, in poverty or living on the streets….it is about PEOPLE stuck in those conditions being susceptible to the disease.

The coronavirus does not care about race, ethnicity, gender, nationality or sexual orientation…just like the ‘woke’, it only cares about propagating itself.

Blow ends his piece with his usual straw man racial calisthenics when he writes, “History has shown that we are callously comfortable averting our gaze away from (black) men like these. We construct racialized rationales that allow us not to care, to say that they courted their fate, that pathology is at play, that one reaps what one sows.”

In what social justice warrior fever dream did Charles Blow conjure up people not caring about coronavirus and shaming its victims? The entire country has shut down in a quixotic attempt to contain the pandemic and minimize its spread, and no one but the most barbaric sociopaths feel anything but pity and sympathy for the poor souls who’ve lost their lives to the disease.

Are the adherents of wokeness, like Charles Blow, correct that alarming numbers of black people are dying from coronavirus? Yes. But it is also true, and equally unjust, that white, Latino, Asian and Native American people are dying in alarmingly large numbers. In other words…a lot of HUMAN BEINGS are dying of coronavirus…regardless of their racial or ethnic background. The Covid-19 pandemic is not a racial tragedy, but rather a human tragedy.

The cold, hard reality is that coronavirus has killed over 30,000 Americans of all races and ethnicities, and more than 130,000 people from nations across the globe. The disease could very well kill me, or you in the coming days, weeks, months and years. But rest assured, no matter how bad it gets or how long Covid-19 rages, it will never, ever kill wokeness – the indestructible cockroach of belief systems.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Detroit : A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating : 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation : SKIP IT. DO. NOT. SEE. THIS. MOVIE. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of something you'd find floating in your toilet. It is awful beyond words. An absolute and unmitigated disaster of a film. 

Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, is the story of a racially motivated police brutality incident at the Algiers Motel during the infamous Detroit riots during  the summer of 1967. The film's ensemble cast includes John Boyega, Will Poulter and Anthony Mackie among many others. 

I had high hopes for the film Detroit. The reason I was so intrigued by Detroit is that I am a very strange person who is fascinated by the history, psychology and cause of riots in America. Be it the draft riots during the civil war or the riots a hundred years later in Newark, Watts, Philadelphia and Detroit, or the infamous Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in the early 90's. What sparks a riot? What is its fuel? And how do individuals and society react when the crowd loses control? Are all topics I could learn and talk about for days on end. So a movie about the 1967 Detroit riot is right up my alley, count me all in. Then I went and saw Detroit. 

I say this without any glee, but Detroit is not only a terrible movie, it is easily the worst film I have seen in recent memory (it makes Kong: Skull Island look like Citizen Kane). Detroit is so appalling it is difficult for me to articulate the scope and scale of its deplorability except to say that as I watched it I fantasized that a riot would break out in Los Angeles and someone would light the theatre on fire with me in it so I'd no longer have to watch this pile of garbage.

In my adult life I have only walked out of one film, that being Mel Brook's Robin Hood: Men in Tights in 1993, and I walked out of it because it was horrendous and it was a free screening so I didn't pay for it. It took all of my might and fortitude not to walk out of Detroit. The only reason I stayed and suffered through its entire two and half hour running time was because I felt a duty to watch the whole thing before I wrote a review of it. In other words, I did it all for you, my dear readers….so you owe me…big league!!

Detroit opens with a jaw-droppingly tired and corny animated piece meant to give context to the Black experience in Detroit that led to the riots. I cringed when I saw it because it was such a frivolous and vacuous explanation for such a complex and compelling issue. I should have walked out right then and there. As the absurd little animation ran I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was going to be bad…but I convinced myself that this was just one small misstep and things would get better. I was wrong…things went down hill from there. Then, after suffering through nearly two hours of vapid nonsense, just when I thought the film had bottomed out and could not become any more ridiculous, monotonous and redundant, then Jim from The Office strolls onto the screen to play a shark of a lawyer in the final third of the film that was already way too long. John Krasinski is so miscast as a defense attorney it left me muttering and shaking my head wondering when this nightmare would be finally over.

Why is Detroit such a catastrophe? Well, let's start with the basics, the writing, casting, directing, acting, cinematography, sound, lighting, costuming, make-up and editing are all appallingly atrocious. Besides that how was the movie, Mrs. Lincoln? 

Just from a filmmaking perspective, Detroit is so dreadfully made it is shameful. The film is completely devoid of the most rudimentary storytelling skill and craft. The movie is an amateurish, sloppy, incoherent, interminable disaster area with absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. None. The technical aspects of the filmmaking are no better. The cinematography is muddled and flat, the sound sub-par and the make-up and costumes so atrocious as to be cringe-worthy. 

Kathryn Bigelow won a Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker, but her direction in Detroit is so abhorrently lazy, unimaginative and trite that I think her Academy Award should be revoked and she should be exiled from filmmaking forever. Bigelow proves herself to be a careless, craft-less and unskilled director with her disgraceful work on Detroit. Detroit should be a serious film, but Bigelow is an unserious director. She is incapable of even the most rudimentary of filmmaking skills, and along with her screenwriter Mark Boal, proves herself to be intellectually shallow and artistically incurious by reducing the characters and narrative to a contrived Manichean melodrama.

There has been some debate as to whether a white director (Bigelow is white) should direct a film like Detroit because understanding the Black experience is so integral to the film. I think artists of any color or gender should direct whatever stories they want, but they need to be at least remotely proficient in their craft. Bigelow is not proficient, she is staggeringly deficient and her lack of talent and ability are made all the more egregious by the fact that she soiled and degraded what is such a potentially fascinating and worthy subject matter. Bigelow's ineptitude reduced the dramatic bombshell of civil unrest and racial strife in 1967 Detroit to nothing more than a hackneyed, contrived, maudlin, unmoored, unbelievable and ultimately cinematically insipid and dramatically flaccid endeavor. If she had the slightest bit of artistic self-awareness she would be utterly ashamed, but I am willing to bet that isn't the case. 

Some have assailed the film for being pornographically violent, which I find laughable. The violence would need to be compelling or even interesting for it to rise to the level of pornography. The problem with Detroit is that since there is zero character development, the viewer has no attachments to anyone on screen, therefore the violence is not jarring, but tedious. Add to that the fact that the choreography of the violence and the make-up are so second rate as to be embarrassing, thus rendering the scars and blood more chuckle-worthy than horrifying. If Detroit were violence porn it would at least rise to the level of being interesting or repulsive as opposed to being dull and boring, which is what it is.

The cast may be fine actors, but they are certainly wasted here. The acting feels more like little kids playing make-believe in their parents basement more than anything else. Will Poulter may be a good actor, I don't know, but he is so bad in Detroit I actually felt bad for him. He looks like he's twelve years old, and he is supposed to be this menacing lunatic who lusts for Black blood. It is an eye-rollingly horrendous performance. Frankly it isn't all his fault, the character is so poorly written and one dimensional that they might have been better off just propping up a cardboard cutout of a White cop and having it stand there in each scene. 

John Boyega is the lone bright spot in the film. I have only seen him in the Star Wars movie and thought he lacked charisma in that film, but in Detroit he hits a sweet spot and even though his character is poorly written as well, Boyega fills him with a believable and palpable inner life. After reading about the actual incident at the Algiers Hotel, it seems that Bigelow and Boal both dropped the ball on Boyega's character, as he is infinitely more interesting, complex and more nuanced in real life than they make him out to be in their film. 

As mentioned in the last two paragraphs, the writing of Detroit is grievously unacceptable. Mark Boal who wrote Bigelow's last two films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, turns in an execrable script. Boal's script is so incoherent and ungainly that it didn't just need dozens more edits, but rather to be trashed entirely never having seen the light of day. It is almost incomprehensible that anyone read this script and thought that it was even remotely screen-worthy. Boal has exactly one more Academy Award for screenwriting than I do, but good Lord he churned out a steaming pile of dog mess with Detroit. 

After bolting from the theatre the very second the film ended, I sat in the lobby and looked online to see what critics were saying about the movie. I never read reviews, but I had to see if people hated the movie as much as I did. I went to Rotten Tomatoes and saw that the film was at 98% critical praise (it has since gone slightly down). I was rendered shocked and speechless by that revelation, and also remembered why it is I never read reviews. Detroit is so awful that it is inconceivable that anyone with even the most remote understanding of the art and craft of filmmaking would think it is worthwhile. Then after meditating on it for a few moments, I understood what was happening. 

Reviewers are saying they like Detroit not because it is well-made or a top-notch film, they are saying good things about it because they do not want to be labelled racist. This is a common occurrence when it comes to racially themed films. When Spielberg made Lincoln, which is an abysmal mess of a movie, reviewers bent over backwards to say how great it was in order to avoid being branded racist. One slightly critical reviewer explicitly stated that even though he didn't love the film, he still was against slavery. He literally said that…out loud. And so it is with Detroit. You are not a serious cinephile or film connoisseur if you think Detroit is an even average level film. You are demeaning the art of filmmaking if you do not clearly state the rancid awfulness of this movie. Hating a poorly made film about racism does not make you a racist, it makes you an honest, truth-telling critic. 

Another reason critics are tentative to trash the film is that it is directed by a woman, and the fear of being labelled a misogynist is almost as strong as the fear of being labelled a racist. The bottom line is this, Kathryn Bigelow is not a shitty director because she is a woman, she is a shitty director because SHE IS A SHITTY DIRECTOR. It isn't complicated. I understand that critics are not exactly known for their intestinal fortitude, but if any reviewer recommends Detroit to you, instantly know that they are a spineless shill who do not care about cinema but about their delicate reputations. 

Obviously Detroit frustrated me no end. The reason for that is that the subject matter is so relevant and vital to our current times. Understanding the why’s and how's of the Detroit riots, and the atrocity at the Algiers Hotel, are crucial if we are to move forward as a nation and culture. He who forgets will be destined to remember, but with Detroit we are given a false and vacant memory absolutely devoid of insight. Bigelow's failure to bring any clarity to the narrative or understanding to the topic, are not only egregious filmmaking errors, but cultural and historical sins. She should not be forgiven for this, or for the shameless propaganda piece she sold to America with Zero Dark Thirty. 

Detroit, or as I have taken to calling it Detritus, is exactly that, a piece of cinematic detritus that should be banished as quickly as possible. The film will no doubt get lots of Oscar nominations for the sole reason that it is directed by a woman, and the Academy wants to push movies directed by women, and also because it is an "important" film about race, and God knows the Academy wants to embrace movies about "race" lest they suffer the idiotic wrath of the factually nonsensical #OscarsSoWhite campaign again. But do not be fooled by the sycophants at Rolling Stone or the New York Times of Washington Post, Detroit is a cinematic abomination. It IS about an important topic, but that doesn't make it important. Think of it this way, Donald Trump is President, does that mean he is presidential? 

In conclusion, Detroit is the worst movie of the year, if not the decade and possibly the new century and the old one too. The film's only value is to expose the critics of the big, mainstream publications for the charlatans and shills that they are. Ignore those critics and ignore this film. If I ever have to sit through Detroit again, I will unleash my pent up rage and burn not only Los Angeles, but all of America to the ground. On the bright side, I promise you that my one-man riot will be infinitely more interesting, insightful and entertaining than the shit sandwich that is Detroit. 

©2017

#OscarsSoWhite : Don't Believe the Hype?

***ESTIMATED READING TIME: 20 MINUTES***

On January 14, 2016, at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards. For the second year in a row none of the actors nominated in the four acting categories, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, were minorities. All twenty nominations went to White actors. The lack of Black acting nominees in particular, set off firestorms of outrage in the media and online.

A day after the nominations were announced, in response to the alleged "snub" of Black actors, artists and films, Spike Lee declared he would not attend the Oscar ceremony where he would have been an honored guest having been awarded an honorary Academy Award in November. Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of one of the actors thought to be "snubbed", Will Smith, also publicly declared she would "boycott" the awards show by not attending or watching it on television. Pinkett Smith tweeted "At the Oscars…people of color are always welcomed to give out awards…even entertain. But we are rarely recognized for our artistic accomplishments. Should people of color refrain from participating altogether?".

Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, a Black woman, said that changes would be made in order to make the Academy, which does not make public it's membership demographics but which is rumored to be 94% White and 77% male with a median age of 62, younger and more diverse. On January 20th, the Academy announced an expansion of membership to include more women and minorities and to make the membership younger and with more recent work experience in the industry. This has done little to quell the anger felt by the Black community and their supporters of all colors, which have used the #OscarsSoWhite meme as a rallying cry.

The emotional response by the #OscarsSoWhite community to what they perceive as racially biased slights and snubs by the Academy and the film industry are very understandable in a historical context, but that doesn't make them rational or even real. Racism is a deadly serious topic, and charges of racism are not a matter to be taken lightly. I believe that the reaction to the alleged slights by the Academy are a result of emotionalism and not rationalism. A closer look at the film business here in America and abroad, and the demographic reality of Black people in those places, shows that the perception of massive Black under-representation in the Oscar acting categories is not one backed up by facts. A closer examination of the films, artists and actors alleged to have been snubbed this year, and their artistic merit, shows that this controversy is much ado about nothing, at least in regards to race. That doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist, it just means that it isn't the reason there have been no Black actors nominated for Oscars in the last two years.

THE SUBJECTIVE

CONTEXT

Part of the uproar this year has to do with perceived snubs from last year. The film Selma is often brought up as a film that was snubbed along with its African-American director Ava Duvernay and its Black lead actor David Oyelowo. The thing that people tend to overlook is that yes, Duvernay and Oyolowo weren't nominated last year, but the film Selma was nominated for Best Picture and won an Oscar for Best Original Song.

Duvernay is a gifted director, and her work on Selma is admirable, but her not being nominated is far from a grievous slight. Selma is Duvernay's first major feature film, and if history is a guide, the Academy needs to be strongly convinced to give any first time director a nomination. It isn't impossible, but it is rare. For instance, John Singleton, an African-American man, was the youngest person ever nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay for his first feature Boyz in The Hood. Selma is a good movie, but I think we can all agree that it is no Boyz in the Hood. And just to put the Academy's reluctance to embrace directors early in their careers into perspective, consider that Martin Scorsese, maybe the greatest American film director, was not even nominated for his fifth feature film Taxi Driver, one of the most iconic films in american cinematic history. In fact, the Academy didn't nominate Scorsese for Best Director until his seventh feature, Raging Bull, and it took the Academy another 30 years after Taxi Driver to finally give Scorsese an Oscar win with his Best Director award for The Departed.

Oyolowo was in a similar boat, as he was relatively unknown to the Academy prior to Selma. His work is terrific in the film, but it isn't transcendent. If Oyolowo had been a more familiar face to the Academy I believe he would have been nominated for Selma. If Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle or Jamie Foxx gave that same exact performance they would have been nominated because the Academy knows and trusts them and their work. Not nominating Oyolowo and Duvernay is not a decision based on racism, but on typical Academy trends and  politics. Which leads us to Oscars General Rule #1 : Except in the most rare of occasions and with the most transcendent performances, the Academy votes for talent with whom they are very familiar.

DEFINING OSCAR

Before going any further, we should try and define what exactly is the purpose of the Academy Awards. Historically, the goal of the Academy when giving out awards to is try and the thread the needle between commerce and art. It wants to reward 'prestige' films which are close enough to the mainstream that they are financially viable yet have artistic merit to them. The Academy wants people to tune in to their awards show, so they nominate films that people have heard of with famous actors in them, but that are not seen as pure popcorn, money making enterprises. I reek of the art house, so for my taste the Academy leans much too far towards commerce, but to the general public they probably lean much to far towards art with their awards. Regardless, this is what the Academy is trying to do. With all of that said, let's take a closer look at this year's controversy.

The purported snubbing of Black actors at this years Oscars has a very simple premise to it, that there are Black actors who gave better performances this year than the White actors nominated. So let's examine the performances most mentioned when discussing the Oscar snubs of this year and see if this premise could be a valid one. 

GUESS WHO'S NOT COMING TO DINNER?

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

The first film mentioned is almost always Straight Outta Compton, the bio-pic of the famous rap group N.W.A. and their rise to fame, and their struggles once they got there. The film was very successful, making $200 million at the box office from a $28 million budget. Which brings us to… Oscars General Rule #2 : Box office success does not guarantee a film is great, or even good, and it certainly doesn't guarantee Oscar nominations. For instance, Star Wars : The Force Awakens, has made a billion dollars this past year but received no nominations. Sometimes films that are extremely financially successful do get nominations, Titanic for example, but that is not always the case.  

Straight Outta Compton is, in my professional opinion and to my terrible disappointment as a fan of N.W.A., not a great movie. It is a pretty standard, paint by numbers, musical bio-pic. It is not very compelling, it looks flat visually, and it has major pacing, performance and narrative issues. The thing that stands out the most to me about the film is how relentlessly safe it is, in structure and in execution. The fact that in reality, N.W.A. was so successful because they were deemed to be so "dangerous" and hard only heightens how flaccid and impotent the film really was. If you are someone who really loved the film and think it deserves an Oscar nomination, I would tell you that I believe that you are seeing the film you wanted to see and not the film that actually was.

In addition, there is not a single standout performance from any of the actors. Yes, the actors looked like the people they were playing, but none of the actors are even remotely good at actually, you know…acting. There is a lot of posing and preening, but there are no genuine human moments in the entire film. The acting performances are incredibly shallow and hollow, it is almost like watching someone trying to act someone who is trying to act. Giving an acting Oscar nomination to any of the cast would be the equivalent of nominating an Elvis impersonator.

Musical bio-pics of iconic bands like N.W.A. are not usually heartily embraced by the Academy. A perfect example is Oliver Stone's The Doors from 1991. Just like Straight Outta Compton, The Doors tells the story of a revolutionary American band from its start to finish and all the turmoil in between. Both films were made about twenty years after their musical subjects broke up and/or died. Unlike Straight Outta Compton though, The Doors had a two-time Oscar winning director at the helm, Oliver Stone, and had a universally praised, dynamic performance from its lead actor, Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. Unlike Oliver Stone, Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray has had basically a journeyman's career with no track record for successful dramatic and artistically relevant films. Unlike Val Kilmer in The Doors, Straight Outta Compton has no well known lead actors and none of them give performances that would rank up there with Kilmer's Morrison. The Academy gave no nominations to The Doors film, its director Stone or its lead actor Kilmer. Like many people, the Academy didn't like The Doors, and like many people, they didn't love Straight Outta Compton either.

One thing to point out is that Straight Outta Compton, like Selma, was not entirely overlooked by the Academy, but rather got a nomination for Best Screenplay. The problem for many though is that the writers of the film were White and not Black. #OscarsSoWhite have used this as proof that the Academy is racist as it shows they only reward White artists and not Black ones. This is just a short cut to thinking. I guarantee you that Academy members had no idea what color the writers of Straight Outta Compton were and just threw the unworthy film a bone in the form of a screenplay nomination in order to NOT be perceived as being racist. Straight Outta Compton doesn't deserve a screenplay nomination, but the fact that people use this one nomination as proof of racism is the height of absurdity. One question that maybe the #OscarsSoWhite people should be asking as opposed to why the Academy only nominated the White writers, is why did Ice Cube hire White writers instead of Black writers to write his film? Could it be that Ice Cube just wanted the best writers he could get at the price he was willing to pay, and these White writers filled the bill? Is Ice Cube racist because he hired White people to write his film? The answer to that is obvious.

WILL SMITH : PARENTS JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND

Another actor often brought up as being rebuffed by the Academy is Will Smith for his performance in the film Concussion. Again, this is quite a stretch in searching for proof of racially biased snubs. Will Smith is, or was at one time, a giant movie star, but he is not now nor has he ever been a great actor. If Will Smith had made Concussion fifteen years ago, he would have been nominated, because he was, at that time, at the height of his career. Which bring us to…General Oscars Rule #3 : The Academy rewards big money-making movie stars for taking chances on prestige films, hence Smith being nominated for Michael Mann's Ali and for his work in The Pursuit of Happyness. It would be an error to conclude that Smith gave great performances in those films because he was nominated, he didn't. He was very average in The Pursuit of Happyness and he was not good at all in Ali, but the Academy rewards people who make them a lot of money, and Will Smith made a helluva lot of people a helluva lot of money, so he was rewarded by the Academy for taking the chance on those two prestige-type films. For an example of the Academy rewarding a movie star with a nomination, look back to Harrison Ford, the box office champ of all time with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and his lone nomination for Witness. Ford wasn't great in Witness, but he had made people tons of money, so the Academy rewarded him for that. Ford tried his hand at other 'prestige' type films, Mosquito Coast and Regarding Henry as two examples, and his work was ignored by the Academy both times.

It is also mildly amusing that Smith and N.W.A. should be brought up in the same Oscar discussion as they are polar opposites in regard to their rap music ability and credibility. Will Smith got into the music and film businesses in order to get rich and famous, not to express his artistic self like N.W.A., this is painfully obvious by the choices he made. His rap career was the worst, most cringe worthy attempt to appeal to as large an audience as possible. Remember "Parents Just Don't Understand"?  In contrast to N.W.A.'s body of work, and Dr. Dre and Ice Cube's post-N.W.A. work, Smith is a laughably soft and weak rapper. His acting career has been equally tepid and just as pandering. Remember "The Fresh Prince"or the calculatingly formulaic Bad Boys, Men in Black, Independence Day and Wild, Wild, West? Smith has succeeded not by being great at anything he attempted, be it rapping or acting, for he is mind numbingly average at both, but by being an extremely appealing presence and a genuinely likable guy. Being so likable and enriching so many people is how he got nominated for Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. For Smith to feel slighted that he is not getting his artistic due with his lackluster performance in Concussion is beyond a ludicrous.

CREED

Which brings us to Creed. There has been much angst that Sylvester Stallone (who is White) was nominated for his role in the 6th Rocky movie but that Michael B. Jordan (who is African-American) was not nominated. Again, this has nothing to do with race. Michael B. Jordan is a terrific young actor, with a great chance at a bevy of Oscar nominations in his future. The reality is that Creed is nowhere near an Oscar worthy film either, but that it is perceived to be Stallone's swan song. It might not actually be his swan song, and the Academy might be getting head faked by the Lazarus-esque Italian Stallion, but the Academy wanted to reward him for his long career and to let walk him off into the sunset a winner (much like they have done with Clint Eastwood…on numerous occasions). Stallone was rewarded for Creed not because he was great in it, but because he, and the film, were 'good enough' given the low expectations they had going in, to give him a pass.

Which brings us to General Oscars Rule #4 :The Academy eventually rewards actors for their long careers and for making a lot of people a lot of money over the course of their careers. Look, God knows Stallone is no Marlon Brando, but he has made people very rich with not only his Rocky movies but with Rambo and all his other films. The question could be raised, if the Academy is rewarding Stallone for all the money he's made people, why not reward Will Smith too? Well, the biggest issue here is not race, but age. Will Smith needs to be around for another two decades or so before the Academy will contemplate giving him what they are giving Stallone, which really amounts to a lifetime achievement type of Oscar nomination. In other words, it simply isn't Will Smith's time yet.

Michael B. Jordan has a truly fantastic career ahead of him, but Creed is the 6th Rocky movie and isn't exactly a prestige film. It was perceived as a money grab to make one more Rocky movie, but the film was better than expected, which doesn't make it great, it just makes it not awful. This is not a reason to nominate the film or Jordan. The same can be said of director Ryan Coogler, who has a very bright future ahead of him as well, but a Rocky sequel is not the place to cry foul on not getting an Oscar nomination.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON

Samuel L. Jackson has also been mentioned as being snubbed for his work in The Hateful Eight. Samuel Jackson has done some remarkable work in his career, but The Hateful Eight is not one of his better performances. It is very derivative of his other, better work (from Pulp Fiction for instance, where he was nominated), and the fact that the film is a lesser outing from Quentin Tarantino doesn't help his argument either.

I would argue that Jackson has lost out on nominations before, most notably in Tarantino's Django Unchained and in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, but I don't believe those lack of nominations were the result of racial bias, just a weak-kneed, poor taste in film by the Academy.

BEASTS OF NO NATION

The performance by a black actor that I think should have been nominate this year, but wasn't, is Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation. I believe the film, it's young Ghanaian-born lead actor Abraham Atta, and Idris Elba all deserved Oscar nominations. Beasts of No Nation, Atta and Elba were not overlooked because of racism, but because of the insidious arrogance of the film business. Beasts of No Nation was distributed by Netflix and because Netflix skirted some arrangements with movie theaters, it was only shown in very limited release in theaters. It was available immediately on Netflix though. The Academy still hasn't wrapped their head around Netflix and looks at Beasts of No Nation as some sort of hybrid film/tv project. Which brings us to…  General Oscars Rule #5 : The Academy only respects film, not tv. Thus Beasts of No Nation was in an industry no man's land and the film, Elba's and Atta's performances were lost to the Academy voters. This is a terrible oversight but not a racially motivated one.

WHO SHOULDN'T BE NOMINATED?

When #OscarsSoWhite talk publicly about the racism in the Academy and this year's lack of Black actors, one thing remains elusive but very important, namely, what White actors who were nominated shouldn't have been nominated. If the #OscarsSoWhite people are going to accuse Academy members of being racist and nominating people based on race, why wouldn't the #OscarsSoWhite people have the courage to say what actors they think should not have been nominated? This is a pretty important point that no one seems to want to bring up.

Who should Will Smith replace on the Best Actor list? Michael Fassbender? Leonardo DiCaprio? Eddie Redmayne? What about Samuel L. Jackson? Should he replace Matt Damon? Or Bryan Cranston? There are arguments to be made, but #OscarsSoWhite has to have the courage to actually make them. They can't say one person deserves a nomination without implying another person doesn't deserve it, so they should have the intestinal fortitude to tell us who they would throw out. 

Since I am asking people to say who should NOT be nominated, I will go first. This year I think Abraham Atta from Beasts of No Nation should, without question, be nominated for Best Actor over Bryan Cranston of Trumbo. Trumbo is a dreadful film and Cranston is awful in it. I would also have nominated Idrs Elba of Beasts of No Nation over Sylvester Stallone from Creed. As previously stated, there are reasons that have nothing to do with race as to why Stallone and Cranston were nominated this year over Atta and Elba. The first reason is (General Oscars Rule #5) the Academy's issue with the releasing of the film through Netflix and not into theaters. The other reasons are that (General Oscars Rule #1) Atta is a total unknown and Bryan Cranston is a beloved actor in Hollywood for his previous work. Elba being overlooked has to do with the Netflix issue (General Oscars Rule #5) and with the Academy rewarding Stallone for his long and prosperous career (General Oscars Rule #4). 

A final note about snubs in general. Snubs happen every year to all sorts of actors. great actors get snubbed one year when they deserve a win, and then get an award another year when they don't. The Academy is slow to reward fresh talent, and quick to give make-up awards. For instance, Denzel Washington should have won a Best Actor Oscar for his tremendous work in Malcolm X. While Denzel was nominated he ended up losing the award to Al Pacino for his work in Scent of a Woman. Denzel deserved the win, but Pacino got the trophy. This was not due to racism, it was because of the fact that the Academy had overlooked Pacino's stellar work earlier in his career. Which brings us to General Oscars Rule #6 : The Academy makes up for most of their very stupid mistakes over time. So in this case, Pacino, who didn't win for his unbelievably great work two decades earlier in The Godfather and Godfather II, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, finally got his award for a less than stellar performance in Scent of a Woman. Denzel was overlooked for his remarkable work in Malcolm X, but a decade later got his Best Actor Oscar for a good but not great (by his lofty standards) performance in Training Day. Another example of this rule in action is that in 1990 Martin Scorsese was nominated but did not win for Best Director for his time-less classic Goodfellas. Instead the Academy gave the Best Director award to…GULP…Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves. This is maybe the most egregious and embarrassing of idiotic mistakes the Academy has made in recent history. But, a decade and a half later, the Academy made it "right" by awarding Scorsese a Best Director Oscar for his rather underwhelming work on The Departed. The Academy can be pretty maddening in its choices, and slow to recognize true genius but…this is how the Academy works, and as Denzel Washington and Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino can attest, it works this way regardless of race.

THE STATISTICS

DEMOGRAPHICS AS DESTINY?

African-Americans have long been a marginalized minority group here in America. Black history is littered with one heinous struggle after another, from slavery to Jim Crow to civil rights and beyond. The African-American community's perception of racially motivated slights, or outright racism, is strongly grounded in historical precedence, so one can't blame that community's thought from taking the shape of a hammer and seeing every problem as the nail of racism. In the case of the Academy Awards though, that perception does not perfectly align with reality.

According to the US Census, in 2014 African-Americans made up 13.2% of the general population of the United States, and, rather interestingly, according to a 2014 study by the Motion Picture Association of America, they made up 12% of the movie ticket buying population. In contrast, Latinos only made up 17.4% of the general population but 23% of the movie ticket buying population.  Asians/others made up 8% of the general population and 11% of the movie ticket buying population. Non-hispanic Whites made up 62.1 % of the general population (not to be confused with European-Americans, who make up 72.4% of population) but only made up 54% of the movie ticket buying population. What does this have to do with Oscar snubs and potential racism? A closer look at Oscar history and statistics reveals that the Academy's choices may not be as racially biased as some perceive them to be.

THIRTY YEARS

In the last 30 years, since 1986, there have been 120 Oscar winners in the acting categories, and there have been 12 Black actors who have won Oscars. Which means that 10% of all acting Oscar winners have been Black, which is 24% below the percentage of African-Americans in the general  U.S. population and 17% below their percentage in the movie ticket buying population.

An even closer look at this 10% number shows us that while it is roughly 24% below the national population percentage of African-Americans, it is actually above the percentage of the African-American population in the state of California where the film industry is centered and one can assume it is also where the majority of the Academy members either live or have lived. In California, African-Americans make up 7% of the general population, and more specifically to the movie industry, in Los Angeles County make up 8.7% of the general population.  Even more specifically to Hollywood, African-Americans make up 9.6% of the general population of the city of Los Angeles. So, the 10% win rate of Oscars for Black actors mirrors back to Academy members almost exactly the general population of the city in which most of them have lived and worked.

Another number of interest is the population of english speaking countries with vibrant film industries, as those countries would more than likely have members in the Academy. So if you add up the total populations of the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Ireland, the Black population combined comes to 9% of the total overall population in those countries. Meaning that according to this metric, Black actors are over-represented by 10% in Oscar wins over the last thirty years. If you add Canada's total population to the U.S., U.K., Australia and Ireland grouping, and add Canada's black population to those countries Black population, the numbers turn out exactly the same, with the Black population being 9% of the overall population. If you reduce the metric to just the U.S. and Canada's populations together, then their overall Black population is 10.9%, showing a small under-representation in terms of Black actor Oscar wins.

When you expand the numbers over the last thirty years to look at Oscar acting nominations and not just wins, the numbers thin, as there have been 600 acting nominees since 1986 and 44 of them have been Black. That is 7.3% of the nominees, which is slightly higher than the percentage of African-Americans living in California, and slightly lower than the Black population in Los Angeles, L.A. county and in the general population of the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Australia combined.

TWENTY YEARS

If you look at Oscar nominations and wins over the last twenty years (1996-2015), Black actors have been nominated 33 times out of 400 nominations and have won 10 Acting Oscars out of 80. That means from 1996 to 2015 (the Oscar ceremony is in February but it awards films from 2015), Black actors have a nomination rate of 8.25% and an Oscar win rate of 12.5%. The win rate is a 25% increase from the thirty year rate (10%) and gives Black actors 24% wins over their population rate in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia. The 12.5% win rate is also 4% higher than the Black percentage of the movie ticket buying population. The nomination rate has increased 11.5% from the thirty year rate and has reduced Black actor under-representation in nominations from the thirty year mark of 19% to 8.3%.

TEN YEARS

If you look at the last ten years, 2006-2015,  Black actors were nominated for Oscars 18 times out of 200 nominations, and won 5 Oscars out of 40. The ten year nomination rate is 9% and the win rate is 12.5%. Compared to the twenty year rates, the nominations have increased by 5.8%, and the win rate has stayed exactly the same. The win rate of 12.5% is still 24% higher than the Black percentage of population in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia and 4% higher than the movie ticket buying population in the U.S.. The nomination rate is exactly the same as the population rate of Blacks in the U.S., Canada, U.K. Ireland and Australia general population combined. This is a pretty fascinating statistic.

CASTING

Another argument by the #OscarsSoWhite movement is that Black actors are under-represented in the casting of roles, so they have fewer opportunities to be nominated for Oscars. According to a study by the Annenberg Center for Communications and Journalism, this is simply not the case. Black actors were cast at a rate of 12.6% from 2007 to 2013 (the last year of the study) which is exactly proportional to their percentage of the U.S. population in the 2010 Census, which is 12.6%. When you expand the casting rate of Black actors to the wider english speaking film industry, they are over-represented by 28.5% in proportion to their 9% population percentage in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, and Australia over that same time period. 

According to the Screen Actors Guild, Black actors are 12% of their membership, which is roughly equivalent to their percentage of the U.S. population in the 2010 Census, and to their Oscar win rate percentage over the last twenty years. Another SAG study from 2007-2008 (the most recent year that study results are available) shows that Black actors are slightly over-represented in casting of film/TV roles, snagging 14.8% of total roles. Black actors were cast in 13.2% of lead roles and 16% of supporting roles.  Black actors being cast in 14.8% of total roles is 10.8% higher than the black percentage of the U.S. general population and 19% higher than the Black actor percentage of the Screen Actors Guild population. Also, it is 39% higher than the Black percentage of the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia general population. Black actors being cast in 13.2% of leading roles is perfectly in line with the Black percentage of the U.S. population, which according to the U.S. Census information from 2014 is 13.2%.

In addition, the Economist Magazine did their own study and found that Black actors get 9% of the top roles in films (they define "top roles" as the top three names on the cast list at IMDB, in films with a 7.5 rating or higher, an American box office gross of at least $10M, and which were neither animated nor foreign-language). Interestingly enough, The Economist claims this shows that Black actors are under-reopresented in "top roles" as compared to the U.S. population, but what it really shows is that The Economist misinterprets their own study by ignoring the vital data of the populations of Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia in addition to the U.S.

A QUICK REVIEW 

A quick review shows a steady progress for Black actors over the last thirty years in regards to Oscar nominations and wins. The Oscar nomination rate has gone from 7.3% (30 yrs.) to 8.25% (20 yrs.) to 9% (10 yrs.). The Oscar win rate for Black actors has gone from 10% (30 yrs.) to 12.5% (20 yrs.) and held steady at 12.5% (10 years). This seems to be in stark contrast to the claims made by the #OscarsSoWhite people.

The statistics also show that Black actors were cast in roles from 2007-2013 at a rate of 12.6% which is in identical proportion to the black percentage of the general U.S. population over that same time period (2010 Census: 12.6% African-American population percentage). The numbers also show that Black actors are cast in "top roles" 9% of the time, which is in direct proportion to their 9% population rate in the wider english speaking film industry nations of the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia.

PERCEPTION AND REALITY

As the statistic show, Black acting Oscar winners are under-represented when compared to the African-American population in the U.S. but are slightly over-represented in regards to the wider english speaking industry, and are right in line with or slightly higher than the African-American population in California, L.A. and L.A. County. But the perception remains that somehow they are dramatically and unfairly under-represented, why is that? I think part of the answer to that question is that Black people are massively over-represented in other media and entertainment fields when compared to the general U.S. population. For instance, on the Forbes list of the most powerful people in entertainment, seven of the top ten people on the list are Black. That is pretty extraordinary considering it is 6 times greater than the African-American representation in the general U.S. population.

The same can be said of the Black percentage of players in professional sport. 74.4.% of all NBA players are Black as opposed to the 23% that are White. That means that Black players in the NBA are over-represnted by roughly 82% when compared to their general population percentage in the U.S. 68% of all NFL players are Black as compared to the 28% who are White, which means Black NFL players are over-represented by 80.5% in relation to their percentage of the U.S. population. These numbers are wildly out of sync with the general population numbers and can give a distorted perception of the demographic reality of the Black population here in the U.S. 

Adding together the inordinate amount of Black entertainers at the top of their fields and Black athletes populating professional sports, it is easy to see where the perception of racism in regards to the Oscars can take shape. By awarding only 10%-12.5% of the acting awards to Black actors, the Oscars seem to fall horrendously short in recognizing Black people when compared to other areas of public life. But the reality is that the Oscars aren't greatly under-representing Black artists, but rather that the other areas, be they music, TV or sport, dramatically over-represent Black people.

The movie business is a business and so these demographic numbers tell us the real story. Racism isn't behind the Academy or the industry and their relationship to blacks, but money is. Blacks make up 13.2% of the U.S. population and 12% movie going population, but according to the MPAA study they only make up 10% of the multiple movie going population (people who see more than one film in a theatre in a given year). In purely business terms, the Black audience is stagnant at best and at worst, shrinking. So not trying to appease or chase the Black audience is not about racism, but it is about the bottom line. Add to these numbers the perceived reluctance of foreign markets, particularly the Chinese market, the holy grail of every studio executive in Hollywood, to embrace Black actors (whether this perception is based on facts is a discussion for another day, but I find it dubious), and you have a recipe for the Black minority to be even more marginalized by Hollywood than they are by their demographic reality in America. Hollywood may be a lot of things, but the one thing it is without question…is a cut-throat, bottom line business. The powers that be in Hollywood do care a great deal about color, but that color is green.

This may not be a pleasant reality, but it is the reality. It is easier to be emotionally swayed to  accuse the Academy and film industry as being "racist" rather than actually looking at and digesting the facts and figures. Black actors are being treated and rewarded right in line with their perceived economic usefulness to the film industry's money lusting overlords. You can rightly blame capitalism, corporatism, globalization or demographics, but you'd be unwise to blame racism, because then you'd be ignoring reality, no matter how cold and hard it may be. 

A DRY WHITE SEASON

If, as the #OscarsSoWhite people seem to be arguing, you believe that the racial breakdown of the U.S. population should be mirrored by Oscar nominations and wins, then there is another group of people who are under-represented in Acting Oscar nominations and wins over the last thirty years….White Americans. Since 1986, there have been 362 nominations for White American actors, which is a percentage rate of 60%. White American actors have won acting Oscars 65 times in this same time period which means they win 54% of the time. Non-hispanic White Americans are 62% of the general U.S. population, which means that White American actors are under-represented in nominations by 3.2%. If you also include Canada in with the U.S., the amount of under-representation slightly grows, as the White population is 67% in the combined countries and the Oscar nomination and win rate stay the same, meaning American/Canadian Whites are under-represented by 10.4% in nominations and 19.4% in wins.

Over the last twenty years White-American actors have a 56.75% nomination rate (227 nominations out of 400) and a win rate of 42.5% (34 wins out of 80). This means that White-American actors are under-represented over the last twenty years by roughly 8.5% in nominations and roughly 31.5% in wins when compared to the White population percentage in the U.S.

Over the last ten years, White-American actors have a 65% nomination rate (144 out of 220) and a 37.5% Oscar win rate (15 out of 40). This means that White-American actors are over-represented over the last ten years by roughly 5% in nominations and under-represented over the same time period by roughly 40% in Oscar wins when compared to the percentage of Whites in the general population of the U.S.. 

When you take nationality out of the analysis, things get even more interesting. If you combine all of the White American actors and the white Canadian, British, Irish and Australian actors to have been nominated in the last thirty years, it comes to 520 nominations. 520 nominations is 86% of all of the acting nominations and the white populations 96 wins are 80% of all Oscar wins over this same thirty year time period. This seems to back up the argument that White actors, regardless of nationality, are massively over-represented. The White population of the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia is 66% of the overall population of those countries combined. Which means that White english speaking actors are over-represented by 17.5% in Oscar wins and 23% in Oscar nominations. Although, if you only count the White and Black populations, and eliminate all other races and ethnicities, in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia, then things align a bit more in that Whites make up 87.4% of the population and have been awarded 86% of acting Oscar nominations and 80% of wins, and Blacks make up 12.6% of that population and have been awarded 10% of acting Oscar wins and 7.3% of nominations over the same time period.

While this proves that U.S., Canada, U.K., Irish and Australian White actors are over-represented in regards to the total population, our earlier analysis shows that this over-representation does not come at the detriment of Black actors. So who is getting left out and why?

THE SILENT MINORITIES : LATINOS AND ASIANS

In terms of America, the answer is pretty obvious, Latinos are dramatically under-represented in the acting categories in relation to their percentage of the U.S. general population. As previously stated, Latinos make up 17.4% of the U.S. general population, but with just 5 acting nominations in the last 30 years, make up .008% of the nominated actors. The only Latino American actors to have ever been nominated are Edwards James Olmos (Best Actor), Andy Gracia (Best Supporting Actor), Benicio del Toro (two Best Supporting Actor nominations), and Rosie Perez (Best Supporting Actress). Del Toro represents the lone Latino American acting Oscar win for his work in Traffic, which brings the Latino American win rate to .008%. Even when taking into account the expansion of the Latino population in America over the last thirty years, this statistic is pretty shocking and oddly consistent.

If you expand the search criteria to actors who speak Spanish as a primary language then the numbers mildly soften. There have been 11 actors nominated from majority Spanish speaking countries over the last 30 years, with 5 nominations coming from Spain, 3 from Mexico, 2 from Argentina and 1 from Columbia. There is only one win, that being Spaniard Penelope Cruz for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The percentage of nominations for Hispanic/Latino/Spanish speaking actors over the last thirty years is roughly .027%. The percentage of wins is roughly .017%.  Even if you expand the U.S. Latino population into the "English Speaking, vibrant film industry" countries of the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Australia, the U.S. Latino population is still 3.5%, well above their Oscar nomination and win rate.

Another group of people seriously under-represented in Acting Oscar nominations and wins are Asians-Americans. Asians make up 6% of the U.S. population, yet an Asian-American actor has not been nominated at all in the last thirty years. When you expand the search to Asians across the globe, there have been just two nominations, one best Supporting Actor nod for Japanese actor Ken Watanabe in The Last Samurai and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Japanese actress Rinko Kakuchi for Babel. That equals a .002% rate for Asian nominations and a 0.0% win rate over the last thirty years, both of which are obviously drastically below the Asian-American U.S. population percentage and so small as to nearly incalculable in regards to the global Asian population.

If we are trying to understand why the Latino and Asian communities are under-represented, we have to make a bunch of assumptions that I don't have the data to confirm or deny. The main assumption is that language is a big barrier to foreign-born Latino and Asian actors. Acting in your primary language is one thing, but the difficulty of acting in a second language cannot be over estimated. Knowing how to speak a language is one thing, and knowing the rhythms, nuances and intricacies of it are entirely another. Also, the Academy is more likely than not, made up of english speakers, so films in foreign languages may get less of a viewing opportunity from members who don't want to read subtitles, and the subtlety of performances may be lost to those not fluent in the language being spoken on screen. Those may be some of the reasons why Latino and Asian actors are so under-represented, but frankly, this argument holds little to no water in regards to Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans, as it assumes that Latino-Americans or Asian-Americans are recent immigrants who are not entirely assimilated into the culture and language, which based on my own personal experience, is an extremely weak premise at best and totally absurd at worst.

It should be noted though that Japan, China, Korea and India all have thriving film industries in their own right, so there would be less of a pressing want or need for success in Hollywood coming from those areas. That said, Asian and Latino directors have still found some success in the Academy where Asian and Latino actors have not. In fact, the last three Best Director Oscar winners have been Latino or Asian, with Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Innaritu winning in 2013 and 2014 respectively and Taiwanese director Ang Lee winning his second Best Director Oscar in 2012. Innaritu is nominated again this year for The Revenant (his third Best Director nomination) and may be a favorite to win the award. The relative success of Latino and Asian filmmakers in recent years is a positive for the film industry and for diversity of artistic vision, even if it hasn't yet translated into more Asian and Latino actors gracing our movie screens.

In looking at the numbers what strikes me the most is that people like Jada Pinkett-Smith, Spike Lee and the #OscarsSoWhite movement are mostly directing their outrage at only Black actors being "snubbed" and under-represented and not about Latino and Asian actors being overlooked. I suppose this makes sense in the case of Lee and Pinkett-Smith since both are African-American. In contrast, what is fascinating to me is that the Latino and Asian communities are not up in arms and claiming racism over their obvious exclusion from the Academy Awards like the Black community has been. Why that is I don't know, but it is very striking nonetheless since the Asian and Latino communities have a much more solid argument. There is a much more compelling case to be made for Benicio del Toro to have been nominated this year for Sicario than there is for any of the previously mentioned Black actors to have been nominated. But the question becomes, was del Toro not nominated because he is Latino? Since Del Toro has been nominated and won an Oscar before, that is a difficult argument to prove.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Which brings us to another uncomfortable question, namely, when race, religion and ethnicity comes up in regards to under-representation, slights and snubs, what group is being over-represented? The "safe" answer is to say "Whites". Of course, not all Whites are the same, or created equal in terms of Hollywood. What does that mean? It means that the thing you aren't supposed to say is something you need to say if you want to have an honest discussion. Namely, that another minority in America, Jews, who make up 1.2% of the general population, are massively over-represented in the film business. This is an easily observable fact. Look at the heads of many of the studios and agencies, Brad Grey at Paramount, Bob Iger at Disney, Michael Lynton at Sony, Les Moonves at CBS/Viacom, Ronald Meyer at Universal, Ari Emanuel at William Morris and Harvey Weinstein at the Weinstein Company, these are just a few of the Jewish movers and shakers in Hollywood.

In regards to Acting Oscar nominations and wins, in just the Best Actor category alone, Jewish actors have won nine times in the last thirty years, for a win rate of 30%, and have been nominated 23 times for a rate of 15.3%. Both the Best Actor win rate and nomination rate are well above the 1.2% Jewish population rate in the U.S. But the question becomes, is that a problem? Is it bad that Jews make up the majority of Hollywood power brokers and a disproportionate amount of Oscar nominees and winners when they are a tiny minority in the population at large? If #OscarsSoWhite thinks Blacks are under-represented than they should have the courage to say that Jews are massively over-represented. This is an extremely uncomfortable topic for obvious historical reasons, but it needs to be brought up if we are saying that the Academy is racist, since the Academy, like Hollywood, is likely populated by many Jews.

In my opinion the answer to the question of Jewish over-representation is…what difference does it make? Just like with Blacks being the overwhelming majority of players in the NBA and NFL, or being 7 of the top 10 most powerful people in entertainment, it is entirely irrelevant. Making it in professional sports requires not only inordinate talent but an immense amount of hard work. So it is with entertainment in general and the film industry in particular. If you succeed in any of these fields it is not because of your race, religion or ethnicity, it is because you are just plain better than the competition and/or have worked harder. In all bottom line businesses, be they sport, entertainment or any other, if you don't get better results than your competition, you won't be around very long. There is no room for ethnic, racial or religious loyalty when victory is the only goal.

CONCLUSION 

Hollywood is an awful, awful place. The film industry is brutal and dehumanizing. Women in particular, of all ethnicities, are treated absolutely atrociously. All people, regardless of color, are seen as little more than opportunities for the powerful to exploit for their own profit. The business is next to impossible to break into, and even when you do break in, you basically have to sell your soul just to get in the room to have the opportunity to audition for a part that might lead to another audition that might lead to another part that might actually get you somewhere. But there is always someone else, someone better looking, someone more interesting, someone better connected, someone 'newer' and 'fresher', or someone just plain better. This is life in Hollywood and entertainment….regardless of color, religion or nationality. The callous gauntlet of Hollywood could not care less about your race, religion or ethnicity, it just wants to know what you can do for it, not what it can do for you.

In the final analysis, the Academy Awards are a pretty ridiculous endeavor, where wealthy, famous and powerful people congratulate one another on how fantastic they think they all are. It is a narcissism measuring contest held by the Narcissism Society of America in the Narcissism Capital of the World (well…it is in the top three with Wall St. and Washington D.C.). The Academy is many things...stupid, sentimental, cowardly, myopic, greedy, but to blindly and emotionally call it racist would be to reduce the power of that charge and diminish the needed impact it would have in areas where the diabolical curse of racism is real and at times deadly. #OscarsSoWhite is a misguided meme that unwittingly endorses emotionalism over rationalism, feelings over reason and a distorted but understandable perception over reality. People would be more accurate, and better served, to say #OscarsSoSHITE than to say #OscarsSoWhite. Regardless, if someone says the Oscars are racist because there are no Black acting nominees this year, be sure to tell them...#DontBelieveTheHype!!!

©2016