I recently watched the Oscar winning movie 12 Years of Slave, of which Lupita Nyong'o
received a academy award for her "outstanding performance." I was skeptical about seeing the
movie, personally I don’t like to watch slavery movies mostly because they’re
too real for me. It’s something about seeing the mistreatment and abuse of my
ancestors that invoke a deep rattling of my soul. But I felt obligated to give
the movie a fair chance, especially after hearing the rave reviews about Lupita’s
performance as well as Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played the main character Solomon
Northup.
Although I loved the performance of Ejiofor, I was a bit
underwhelmed by the performance of Lupita. Not that I disliked her acting, I
actually thought she was great. But to be honest, of the two hours the movie
lasted she played in about 15-20minutes, and most of her on screen time she was
silent. And when she did actively play a role in a scene, I still didn’t see a
Oscar worthy performance. Although I will admit the scene when she was getting
whipped by Chiwetel was intense and heart-breaking, I still didn’t see an “extraordinary”
performance overall.
After watching the movie and giving it sometime to process,
I struck up a conversation with a close friend of mine. I brought up my
concerns about the lackluster of Lupita’s performance compared to the hundreds
of reviews telling me how awesome she was. He agreed pointing out some of the
same things that I took note of. And with this in mind I started to
wonder, why was it such a “mind-blowing” performance? I’ve seen acting far
greater than the 20 minutes she played in that movie, and none of those
performances were raved about or even nominated for an academy award. Of
course, I brought race into it, which I found to be a reasonable response
considering the movie was about slavery and it’s a rare occasion that I black
actor even gets nominated for an academy award, let alone actually wins.
Actually when I began to think about it, I could think of
multiple black actors with Oscar-winning performances that have been passed
over year after year after year. Performances that have been breathing taking
and so real that the audience gets lost in the moment and actually starts feels
what the actors are portraying. Performances that even the most critical of commenters
raved about. I could even think of multiple movies, with a mostly black cast,
that were mind-blowing and yet no nominations were given.
While re-watching an incredible movie called For Colored Girls, which follows the
lives of various black women displaying the different walks of lives of the women in
the black community. With a cast of extraordinary actors that have been known
to truly embody multiple characters in different roles, and excel. Some of which are
Kerry Washington (in the movie Ray), Loretta
Devine (in Waiting to Exhale), Anika
Noni Rose (in Dream Girls), Whoopi
Goldberg (in The Color Purple) and Phylicia
Rashad (in The Cosby Show). They put
together these fantastic actors and gave them an amazing script that depicted
the struggle and true life stories of some women of the black community. With
that, they added poems adapted from an amazing play called “For Colored Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide When the End of the Rainbow is Enough.”
The movie was produced and directed to a T. As a viewer and
an “amateur movie critic”, I gave the movie 5 stars, everything was perfect. It
was real and dramatic with so much truth that I felt like I knew these girls—the characters
that they played. I felt like they portrayed an image of my mother, my sister, my
aunt, or a classmate I once knew. There was so much honesty that it was almost unbearable.
What there wasn’t was recognition by the Oscars or SAGs, but of course they
were recognized for a phenomenal performance by the NAACP Image Awards.
I couldn’t help but to notice a disparity in the
entertainment industry and more than one question found its way into my mind (and
now on my blog). If you really look at the nominations for academy awards
involving black actors, you’ll notice that the majority of the nominations and
winners portray a negative side to the community (i.e slavery, corruption,
poverty). The industry tends to overlook the triumphs and the positive side of
our community. Sure, perhaps 20 to 30 years ago we had Spike Lee blowing the
ceiling off of race relationships as it pertained to the movie industry. He
bridged a gap and showed not only the negative sides of the black community
but also the real life aspects of black culture informed all American’s about
what was really going on in our communities, just like in the movie For Colored Girls. Nowadays our
community is overlooked unless we play a slave, a butler, a maid, an abusive
mother or even an alcoholic pilot.
Another point that came into mind as I began to look at the
industry is location. It seems Atlanta has become the “black Hollywood” over
the past 10 years. First starting with the Tyler Perry franchise and now
spreading to more and more major and independent black movies. My question is
why? As I contemplated more, best answer that I could think of is, because that’s
where we are accepted, with our own kind. This modern-day segregation reminds
of the Jim Crow laws of the south, it’s unspoken but everyone knows the rules. They are as follows:
1.
Limit the amount of blacks in major Hollywood
films
2.
Fair skin is the “right” skin
3.
Work twice as hard to get a quarter as far
4.
Tyler Perry is your best bet if you want to “make
it big”
5.
Atlanta is the place to be for black
entertainers
6.
MUST play maid, slave, butler, etc for any
academy award recognition
Do you see where I’m going with this? What's your opinion?
