Or maybe comic books are just basically aimed at 13 year old boys, with a lack of emotional, spiritual, or intellectual sophistication.
Obviously they must have their virtues, but perhaps are not likely to produce the kind of nuanced roles that lead to Oscars.
Consolation, are your forgetting the Oscar posthumously awarded to Heath Ledger for ‘The Dark Knight?’
Part of the problem with this is we assume the academy awards are made based on rational voting decisions, or necessarily that the winners were the best out there, when in some cases you might wonder why the movie was nominated in the first place. In one of the “Naked Gun” movies they make fun of this, when Drebbin is on stage at the academy awards during the best picture presentation, and he says “it is the bomb” (meaning there is a bomb in the envelope), and everyone is cheering because some movie that made like a buck fifty at the box office won. How many really great movies were not nominated for best picture (the original Star Wars movies), and how many times does a movie that audiences really liked get snubbed for best picture?
I think you get the point, the nomination and award voting process is not scientific in the least bit, and more importantly, movies often get nominated that had the biggest PR campagin (the comedy “For Your Consideration” makes fun of that aspect). It often looks like the voters deliberately snub popular movies, while voting for something few people saw or even really wanted to see. Others have made the point that it is kind of ridiculous to sit there and judge when you have heavy hitting actors or actresses competing with each other. Paul Newman made some fantastic movies, but never won, but ended up winning for “The Color of Money”, which while it was a fun movie, was not exactly “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or “Hud”. Other actors never won an award, but often end up with ‘lifetime achievement’ awards when the voters figure out it was a travesty…
I think the problem is not with awards, it is with actors getting cast in movies to allow for them to receive awards. You look at many movies, and typical black and hispanic actors are represented a lot more in the small roles or background roles than in major roles, and it is the major roles that get nominated. The problem I think is that casting agents and studios assume a lot of things, that for example casting more black, hispanic and other non white actors would turn off white viewers, which I think is both stupid and plain wrong. Especially with younger people, who already are used to listening to and going to concerts with black artists, whether it is hip hop or pop music, I don’t think they would have a problem with it, and there are plenty of good young non white actors out there. Especially in fictional movies, if set in modern times, there is simply no excuse for casting actors who are non white, if the race of the character doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t cast white actors in Porgy and Bess, because it is set in the black community in a town in South Carolina, I wouldn’t cast a black actor in a docu-drama about the Manhattan project as one of the scientists, because as far as I know there were none. But if I was going to cast a movie about a CIA agent saving the world, or if I was going to cast a movie about a scientist who makes some kind of great breakthrough and is being pursued by bad guys and turns out to kick butt, why not cast a black/hispanic/Asian/etc actor in it?
Even in a movie like the “Big Short”, the plot of the movie does not require it be cast the way “real life” was. The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis’ book, but it has plenty of artistic license in it, at least from hearing from colleagues of mine who have seen it, read Lewis’ book and also know the true story, the basic plot of the movie does not depend on the characters being white, and since it is not a documentary, it doesn’t pretend to be totally true to reality, why not cast an Asian in it (I hate to tell people, but these days in the Financial industry, there are a lot of Asians coming up the ranks, and the quant who almost single handedly caused the CDO mess with a pricing model that was basically fiction, was a Chinese guy in real life), and even if blacks and hispanics might be a small percent of Wall Street, so what, movies are fiction, not real life (except in Galaxy Quest lol).
Part of it is that in Hollywood, the casting agents, the directors, the screenwriters, and the producers are still mostly white, and in many cases, white men, and they tend to cast people like themselves, and I would bet that a lot of them aren’t even conscious of what they are doing or what is going on. If casting agents are sending them only white actors, it isn’t likely they are getting on the phone and saying “hey, send me non white actors”, they take what they get and may not even assume (again, from things I have read).
This year, I was surprised Will Smith didn’t get nominated in “Concussion”, while the movie had its flaws, I was amazed at his perfomance, I didn’t even recognize Will Smith, and having seen the real life model for the role, he did a pretty darn good job building the character, he might not have deserved to win (given I haven’t seen many of the other roles nominated), but it deserved IMO at least a nomination.
The irony is that one of the reasons this happens is that non white audiences will go to movies like this, with white actors dominating most of the roles, so Hollywood figures that their formula must be working. I don’t think that they gain a lot more from whites supposedly wanting to see movies with white actors, I think that they don’t lose anything by doing that, because non white audiences go to movies and support them, so they go with what they feel comfortable with.
It is funny, there is a rough analogy to what is going on in Hollywood with baseball, one of the arguments they made about not letting blacks into baseball was that they would drive off white fans, and what they of course found out is that with the introduction of black players and the kind and level of ball they brought to the game, it actually increased the popularity of baseball, and also attracted non white spectators in larger numbers, too. Today we would cringe at it, but many people accepted when George Weiss, the GM of the Yankees, saying that the Yankees didn’t hire black ballplayers (they were one of the last teams to integrate in the late 50’s, and even into the 60’s had teams that had few black players) because it would “offend boxholders from Westchester if they had (the N word) players on the team”. It is the same with movies, and I think it is stupid, when people watch a movie, if the movie is good and the acting is good, I don’t think most people other than the far out coo coo clocks give a crap what race an actor is, the real problem is in the minds of the people running the system and their assumptions, and that is where change has to happen.
TL;DR. Is there a Readers Digest version?
Idris Elba is British; I agree that the (possibly?) Nigerian accent he adapted in “Beasts of No Nation” was dazzling.
Oh wait, he wasn’t nominated. Nevermind…
It’s true about accents. Doesn’t have to be British–witness Meryl Streep’s long list of nominations.
I’m not going to speak for @Consolation , but IMO Heath Ledger did not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight; he won because it was posthumous and because he should have won for Brokeback Mountain.
Remember the year Do the Right Thing came out and wasn’t nominated for best picture? That was the year Driving Miss Daisy won…
Charlotte Rampling, who I think is an excellent actor, has been quoted by the BBC as saying the boycott is racism aginst whites. Not sure that was a good PR move.
Musicprnt: If a big advertising blitz secured a nomination for Best Picture, then “Straight Outta Compton” would surely have been nominated. For a month, I couldn’t turn on the radio for even 5 minutes without hearing an ad promoting it for Best Picture.
well as far as I’m concerned, all the awards ceremonies could go away without even a ripple in my life.
The difference between professional sports and other types of entertainment is that it sports talent tends to be heavily judged on non-subjective results, like winning games and stats intended to show how good players are, while success in other types of entertainment is based on subjective opinions of viewers. A racist sports fan may still prioritize winning over what color the player is, but may apply racism much more when telling others how good a movie or television show is. This does not mean that professional sports are free of racism, but it is not too surprising that movie and television show casting lags (perhaps by decades) behind professional sports, since directors of the latter may be catering to racist attitudes among viewers to a far greater level than sports teams choosing which players to hire (in either drafts or free agency).
Note that, in professional sports, the suspicions of racism in hiring tended to stick around far longer for coaching and other staff than for players, due to quality of such being judged more subjectively and more subject to influence from racist views (more among those doing hiring than the fans, though).
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Agree 100% and he did accents too. I always forgot he was actually Australian.
Oh my god. Someone suggested that a role in The Big Short could not be played by a black actor, because they were in real life mostly white people.
Exactly!!! It would be like someone casting Othello with a white actor in the lead role!
/sarcasm.
And hey, there was a Beach Boy movie this year.
Hence, racism in movies does not exist.
Or the contrast of how recent TV shows/movies depict NYC demographics. “Girls”, “Sex In The City”, and other shows/movies with main stories/key scenes in NYC have been criticized for providing a portrayal of NYC being far less racially diverse than it actually is IRL:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/25/minorities-in-movies-and-television
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/white-girls
http://gawker.com/5905885/hipster-racism-runoff-and-the-search-for-the-black-costanza
http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2008/06/19/race-and-sex-and-the-city/
Musicprnt, your analogy about the NY Yankees is interesting. I met an old timer, a white gentleman and New Yorker originally from Puerto Rico, whom loved baseball but disliked the Yankees tremendously. When I asked why he said it was because, for years after integration the Yankees steadfastly remained “lily white.”
If you’re talking about me, I didn’t say the roles couldn’t be played by a black actor, just that I can see why the producers chose to cast white actors, given that the characters were based on real people, who happened to be white.
I haven’t seen SOC but I did see Beasts and I thought it was brilliant. I don’t know how much it was damaged in the nomination process by the fact that its release was limited to an Oscar run.
War Room was originally supposed to have a white cast. It was written, produced, and directed by white men who decided the story was more compelling with a black cast.
Hope you folks have seen Nick Cannon’s video “word poem” on this issue. He raps and said that by all means Chris Rock should keep his commitment to host the academy awards (I agree). In my opinion the most appealing part of Cannon’s argument is his assertion that the the protagonists in this year’s Academy Awards controversy are complaining essentially about a ‘First World Problem.’
As a black woman my answer is not only NO but HELL NO! There are so many other issues going on in the black community. This is a stupid thing to take a stand on. Why aren’t famous black people talking about Flint MI. The state of schools in the black community. Things that actually matter.