I think that was her in "Collateral" starring Tom Cruise as a hit man (it actually worked!) and Jamie Foxx as the cab driver coerced into helping him. She was okay, but nothing any other actress couldn't have handled. BTW I have a GREAT idea for a movie - hear me out - a movie about minorities not getting enough opportunities in movies. And the whole cast is native american, physically/mentally handicapped, transsexual, frozen neanderthals brought back to life, or any combination of these categories. So who's on board my success train?
Except black actors and actresses are not under represented in the Oscars. If you bother to look at who has actually won awards in the past blacks actually have won more Oscars than blacks are as a percentage of population. That would mean blacks are actually OVER represented in actual Oscar wins. Yet the self serving folks like Spike Lee want to still play the race baiting game which is just nonsense.
Jada Pickle Smith has never been on my radar as an actress. Will Smith's movies used to be entertaining 20 years ago when he had the funny badass attitude and he was fighting aliens. Now he fancies himself a thespian. Who I'm really tired of is his very untalented son, who's he trying to shove down Hollywood's throat. Every time I've seen this kid on talk shows, he's been an insufferable little shit. Now, Viola Davis...something about her says "I would be interested in her movies, if the movie was about something other than her skin color."
I know - I saw the graph too, and addressed it. They are nominated slightly less, but win slightly more. That pretty much spells out "much ado about nothing" in my book.
In the history of the Oscars, going back to 1939, blacks have been nominated for acting awards fewer than 50 times, and only 15 have won. 11 of those winners have been since 1990, coinciding with mounting pressure on the Academy to recognize minorities. You can spin those numbers any way you want, but I don't think there's any legitimate argument to make that blacks, and certainly other minorities, have historically been frozen out of this White America popularity contest.
It's not 1939 anymore. We can't correct racism in the 1940's and 1950's by handing Oscars to every black person who is in a music video today.
Flashlight - by your own admission since 1990 things have gotten much, much better diversity-wise. But great movies starring black actors might not appear every year - next year there might be many of them. It's not a linear function.
Since blacks make up 13 percent of the population (and 99.99% of the NBA when you include transracial whites), and there are usually about five Oscar nominations in a category, on average you'd expect a black to get nominated in a category every other year. Maybe someone who likes doing statistics can tell us how often they'd be expected to hit two years in a row without a nomination in the several categories at issue this year. But let's talk about the elephant in the room. Hispanics make up about 16 percent of the population and have only gotten one best actor nomination in all of history (Edward James Olmos). In contrast, Denzel has six nominations. That's right, one black guy has six times more Oscar nominations than all Hispanics combined. Is it racism, or is most of the top Hispanic talent making films for the vast Latin market? There's also marketing. A lot of black films concentrate on the black American experience (Slavery, rap, ghetto struggles, Civil Rights struggles). Although such movies can do well in America and parts of Europe, most of the world doesn't give two shits about the black American experience and so such movies don't sell elsewhere. If ten percent of European movies focused on Gypsys or Lapland reindeer herders, we'd avoid those, too. One of the reasons for Hollywood's international dominance is that American culture necessarily had to strip ethnic peculiarities out of most of our films. They aren't Swedish, Italian, Spanish, German, Irish, French, or Polish, they're a distillation that can have broad appeal instead of catering to niche markets. Where would the Canadian film industry be if they concentrated on producing quintessentially Canadian movies about Canadians in Canada acting all Canadian? And yet many black nominations are for roles that could be played by anyone, such as Denzel playing an airline pilot, Morgan Freeman playing a convict in "The Shawshank Redemption", or Samuel L Jackson playing a hitman in "Pulp Fiction". They don't need black roles, they're great actors who command respect instead of demanding respect. They are defined by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. And then we have Jada Pinkett Smith demanding quotas, as if blacks just don't have the talent to win Oscars without special set-asides, even though they dominated in recent years by delivering outstanding performances. But then she's probably still fuming that Willow got passed over for "Whip My Hair" at the Grammy's in favor of some overweight, lower class British nobody named Adele.
Of course there's no correcting for 1939, any more than giving reparations to modern day blacks corrects for slavery 200 years ago. And when you look at the Black winners since 1990, several smack of obvious tokenism, especially when the competition at the time is considered. In fact, I think I'll list the Black winners and their competition, does their victory hold up all these years later?
Yeah.....I agree to an extent. If we were talking about only a 10-year sample, perhaps I'd like the argument a bit more. But even since 1990, were there really only 11 worthy performances by minority actors in the past 25 years? If you expand the discussion beyond Blacks, the disparity is really ugly. Who is the last Asian actor to have won, the last American Indian? BTW - this discussion is far more interesting than watching the Panthers destroy the self-destructing Cardinals.
Since 1990: Best Actor winners- 2001 - Denzel Washington, Training Day. Who was his competition? Russell Crowe A Beautiful Mind Sean Penn I Am Sam Will Smith Ali Tom Wilkinson In the Bedroom Training Day was an instantly forgettable movie that featured Washington playing against type as a quasi-villain. Was he really better than Crowe playing a paranoid schizophrenic in the Best Picture winning film? The Crowe role certainly became more iconic. Tokenism here, despite the fact it was Washington's second Oscar. It would have been more legitimate to have given him Oscar #2 for 2012's Flight. He was very good as the self-destructing alcoholic pilot. 2004 - Jamie Foxx, Ray. Who was his competition? Don Cheadle Hotel Rwanda Johnny Depp Finding Neverland Leonardo DiCaprio The Aviator Clint Eastwood Million Dollar Baby Tokenism all the way. Foxx doing an extended Ray Charles impersonation? If Will Smith couldn't win doing the same kind of thing in Ali, why should Foxx have won here? The more deserving minority actor choice would have been Cheadle. And Cheadle became War Machine. 2006, Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland. Who was his competition? Leonardo DiCaprio Blood Diamond Ryan Gosling Half Nelson Peter O'Toole Venus Will Smith The Pursuit of Happyness Pretty weak category if the best they could come up with was Ryan Gosling and Will Smith again. Whitaker was probably the best of this bunch.
Yet in every one of those cases 20 percent of the nominees were black. Maybe this latest dust up is like hiring blacks at the DMV. Once they start landing jobs they think all the positions are theirs forever - for justice. Well, competition isn't that way, and past performance is no guarantee of future success. To draw on the example of UK basketball, winning the NCAA championship doesn't mean the next season won't see us blown out of the first round of the NIT. Each year is a new battle and the competition is always fierce. Everything has to gel and everyone has to perform above and beyond to go all the way. You can't just phone it in and you can't rest on your laurels. As has been said, if Jada Pinkett Smith has her way then every black Oscar might as well have an asterisk next to it.
HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE! "Whip My Hair?" I didn't know Will Smith's kid was Neil Young. I did not see that coming! OMG forward to about 2:20 or so - Bruce does his best...Bruce impersonation yet!
Danny Davitto blames the entire country for being racist. Did I miss something, are the Oscars a national election? http://m.aol.com/article/2016/01/25/danny-devito-comments-on-oscars-diversity/21302394/
Your usual posting style aside, you hit on a very good point. The Oscars bait movies and the ones catered to black audiences are mutually exclusive. There's also the fact that a lot of the good films with black casts often have the same themes of portraying the culture in a negative light. "Precious" is the most recent example of this. And I'll cosign on Jade and Willow Smith being two of the most entitled brats in Hollywood. Willow is even worse at singing that Will himself, and that guy made "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It".
if you're gonna boycott the Oscars because there are no black nominees, well, then it seems to me you would boycott the Democrat presidential primaries too
Boo-ya! They say the Republicans are the old white men AKA "haters" party yet looky looky - a black and a two hispanics (I think, one looks like Pee-Wee Herman then again Pee-Wee might be who knows) but I'm sure they are brainwashed.
I'm boycotting the Oscars in solidarity with my black brothers and sisters in the entertainment industry.
I'm already boycotting the post office for lack of diversity. Only one white person in the whole place?
Don't be silly. The post office is filled with white people. You just can't see them easily because they blend in with the envelopes like they were wearing camouflage.
Once again the Oscars prove themselves irrelevant. Spotlight? There for a while I thought the Academy may have grown some stones and decided to go with Mad Max, as Max was cleaning up with most of the technical awards. But no.... DiCaprio's speech came off as way too rehearsed. I do not like him and have never paid to watch him in any movie other than Titanic. And doing a poor man's Al Gore impersonation?
