“Two birds with one night!”
And so two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington summed up the historic 2001 Academy Awards ceremony. That evening Washington received his Best Actor prize, 40 years after the legendary Sidney Poitier had become the first black actor to do so. That same night Poitier himself received an honorary Oscar, his second overall. The most memorable moment of the evening, however, was when Halle Berry became the first black woman ever to receive the Best Actress Oscar.
Every year as the annual Academy Awards ceremony approaches, the obligatory debate over the meaning of the Oscars also arises. For better or for worse, the Oscars tend to serve as an indication of the direction in which the Hollywood political current is flowing. Though the 2001 Oscar ceremony seemed to suggest that Hollywood was finally deconstructing its racial barriers 40 years after the Civil Rights era, there remained many skeptics, like Washington who saw the night less as a harbinger of change than as a pat on the back for phony progressivism.
This year Hollywood may finally prove the skeptics wrong.
In case you hadn't heard, 2004 has been retroactively branded the year of Jamie Foxx. With his phenomenal performances in both Collateral and Ray, Foxx has finally propelled himself onto Hollywood's A-list with the likes of Washington, Will Smith, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Foxx may not be the first actor to have successfully parlayed two outstanding performances into two Oscar nominations in a single year (Julianne Moore most recently), but he is the first black actor to do so. However, Foxx is not the lone black performer in the 2004 Oscar race—Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, and Sophie Okonedo also scored nominations—setting five as the new record for Oscar nominated black performances in a single year.
But what does this all mean? Surely this surge in recognition isn’t because black performances are suddenly better than they used to be. Before the performances can come to fruition, the roles themselves need to first exist. Has Hollywood finally discovered that there’s an audience for films driven by black characters?
“Racial reward can never be untainted by the racial historical past,” Literature professor Grant Farred offered. “It is at these historical moments when the creations of the critical masses put pressure on the white-dominated establishment that more opportunities are created.”
In a press release put out by the NAACP immediately following the Oscar nominations, Vicangelo Bulluck, exectutive producer of the NAACP Image Awards, noted the progress but cautioned that there was still room for improvement. “In celebrating the achievements of the nominated artists the NAACP maintains there is a struggle for more representation of people of color behind the scenes and below-the-line. We continue to be concerned about the lack of significant roles for women of color.”
Hustle & Flow, the much buzzed-about film at the Sundance Film Festival, features noted black director John Singleton in the role of producer. The independently financed film about a Memphis pimp trying to make it as a rapper started a bidding war that ended at 5 a.m. when Paramount Studios successfully closed a distribution deal for $9 million with the help of MTV. Hustle & Flow, however, did not garner rave reviews at Sundance, with some criticizing the film’s capitulation to African-American stereotypes and its derivative exploitation of the urban genre. What then is the true measure of success? Is it overcoming stereotypes? Or is it increasing the number and exposure of black films?
Perhaps the problem lies within the question itself.
“[These questions] will always reformulate, rearticulate themselves at different political junctures,” Farred concluded. “[The task is] not to continue the dominant narrative, but to ask the question in a different way.”
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