Well another year of pagentry has come and gone and one thing that the Academy remains faithful to is their committment to honor the Black maid. Can you imagine if half of all the awards that White women earned were for their role as burger flipper? I'm pretty sure you can't. That would be because White women can be nominated as; crusaders for social justice, rape victims, heads of state, Queens, nuns, ballerinas, and mothers.
Black women, not so much. At this point it is pretty clear, that even if Hollywood decided to make a movie about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's rise to power and her Peace Prize, if she had a maid that's who would be recognized.
Hattie McDaniel won her award back in 1940, for what I'm told was a really funny turn as Scarlett O'hara's maid. Funny she is called a maid for the part of a slave. I guess some people have problems with the distinction, but one generally gets paid while the other doesn't. But that reason for calling Hattie's character a maid, may lie in some of the other Black women who have either won or not the little gold man.
After Hattie's win there was a long drought before another Black woman was able to take the prize statue home. The next would be Whoopee Goldberg for her turn as a fake psychic (criminal) in the movie Ghost.This may have represented a turning point in how Hollywood viewed Black women. Now we could be rewarded for roles as "maids" and crooks. The spectrum which we were being viewed was a ying-- caretakers-- and yang --takers-- but whatever goes in between, was rarely acknowledged and certainly not feted.
Before Goldberg won in 1991 there was a triple nomination in 1985 for Oprah as Sophia (a woman forced to be a maid), Margaret Avery as Shug (the whore juke joint singer), and Whoopee as Celie (the abused wife) inThe Color Purple. Oprah and Margaret were nominated for supporting roles while Whoopee was nominated for her star turn. Earlier I said that the distinction between appearing to be a willing maid and being forced to be one seems to weigh heavily here as Oprah didn't win. Her Sophia clearly was beaten and imprisoned into submitting to maid work: and the rule to winning for a maid's role is you have to wanna be one.
The Academy was on a roll in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008. In those years Black women stretched themselves a bit more. Sophie Okonedo the second Black Brit to be nominated (none of them for maids roles) played a supportive wife in Hotel Rhwanda. Jennifer Hudson won her Best Supporting Actress award for Effie the Dream Girl in 2006. Ruby Dee was nominated for her turn as Mama Lucas in American Gangster in 2007. And in 2008 Viola Davis and Taraji P. Henson were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress for their turns as mothers. In 2009 Monique would win for her role as an abusive mother in Precious.
Of course winning the Best Supporting role seems to cancel out any chance of a nominated co-star winning the top prize as it has never happened to a set of Black actresses. However, Hattie McDaniel and Vivian Leigh did each receive one for Gone With The Wind for the different catagories. Which brings us back around to 2011 nominees and winners. Black women didn't move far from the mammy, maid, or slave roles from 1939 to 2011. We certainly haven't been recognized for our work as; social workers, sex symbols, lawyers, movement leaders, politicians, Queens, heads of state, or journalists. In 2011 we have come full circle to Octavia Spencer bringing something new and different to the role of the Black maid, and being rewarded for her effort. I can't tell you as a Black woman how grateful I am to Hollywood, for their continuing effort to present Black woman as woman. I mean it, I can't tell you.
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Her statue was much smaller than the others, too. ~r
Had the role been a cliche, she said, "...I wouldn't have done it. You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character. A character can't be a stereotype based on the character's occupation."
Davis told interviewer Terri Gross she'd played one-dimensional characters in the past, but she said she didn't see Aibileen — the 53-year-old maid with a sixth-grade education — falling into that category.
"I saw her going on a journey. I saw her having humor and heart and intelligence. I saw her as having duality. And that's what I look for above anything else. Because usually, that is what's missing."
Here's a link to the interview: Viola Davis
http://www.oprah.com/own-master-class/Oprahs-Master-Class-Morgan-Freeman.
Good, well-researched article as always, Des.
I live in a town that has a Shakespeare Festival, one of the more popular ones in the country I think, the acting is just excellent, the roles are given to the actor that fits it, not chosen to fit traditional race roles. So, my first MacBeth viewing, the actor who played MacBeth was black. The next play had three siblings, played by two whites and a black actor, the next play had an Asian mother and black son...
I loved them all as the priority was to have the best actors playing those roles, and it was just as easy to disappear into the characters and plot, easier, because of the excellent acting. Time to move on, Hollywood filmmakers.
That said, I heard both Octavia Spencer's and Viola Davis's performances were excellent. I haven't watched the movie and the book sat by my bed for months after being given to me, I was so reluctant to read it....
Can I just say that Gone With the Wind is a horrible movie, with nasty characters, way too long, and then there's that disgusting scene where Vivian Leigh barfs up a carrot? You couldn't pay me to watch it again.
I was interested to read June's comment dissing Tyler Perry. Someone invited me to a Tyler Perry movie night at her house, and although several of her friends (also black) seemed to think he was hilarious, like June, I thought his characters were stereotypical, his narratives simplistic and kinda immature. Sitting on a couch with laughing black people though, I figured it would not be polite to say this.
As for Morgan Freeman, I love the roles he chooses. He gets to write his own ticket these days though. It's worth mentioning that women can't–black women, older women, heavy women, and lots of other kinds of women not boobed and tucked. Imagine the female equivalent of Nick Nolte being hired for even a bit walk on role. Never ever happen!
@oahusurfer, that being said I think most of the other comments are of people either understanding what the "beef" is about, others working to understand, and those who understand that Blacks don't all think alike and here is a very good example of why.
@Just thinking, exactly the point. Why should women with this kind of talent have the choice of no work and maid work, because all the other roles are looking for someone, anyone who isn't you.
@greenheron, one day we are going to open the blinds and allow real discourse, you are going to be allowed to say to Black people I don't get the Tyler Perry humor, here is why, and people are going to say that's cool and I get that. Unfortunately I think that Black people are so starved to see ourselves that we will go to a minstrel show if it means being represented. That is what is so sad about this movie. When the man on the panel speaks about the cops beating one of the maids and 30 minutes later still battered she is back to assuming her picaninny role of laughing through the pain and humiliation that says everything to me. And really only someone with no understanding of the situation could have written such a scene. My parents never allowed us to see Gone With The Wind because it was so demeaning and that isn't the image they wanted us to have of ourselves. The Help isn't the image I want to have of myself either.
Regarding white people who rationalize the pain away, speaking for myself, sometimes the guilt feels so very very great, it is almost unbearable, and you want to shift something, anything, to minimize it in your own mind. The man who commented way back, can't remember his avatar, but said something like well, enjoy your hate white people month...that isn't so far off the mark, when you are willing to accept the weight of what was/is done by white people to black people. This whole Oscar thing puts it right into the present moment. People feel better patting themselves on the back and thinking they did their bit when they voted for Obama and/or watched The Help and found it good, and now it's all fine.
An image that has stuck in my head since the election, was a brief nanosecond when a camera was on the face of Jesse Jackson at the moment it was announced that Obama had officially won the presidency. It broke my heart. You could see a whole life of emotion cross his face in an instant: how hard he had worked to be elected himself, some degree of envy and regret, tears, then sheer elation that he was seeing a dream come true. I cried then, for him, for what all that cost him. He would have been a fine president, and it sucks that he could not be. But....just to highlight what an old hippie I am, I wanted to see Dick Gregory become President too.
that right there, yeah, I get that.
and it does suck- profoundly
@hyblaean julie, it does profoundly suck. I posted a story called Highway To Here about a real Black family, that is an epic story. It will never make it to the big screen, because as Hollywood told George Lucas who will believe it? Right our history has been so distorted that when you want to bring it to the screen the very people who have diligently brought fairy tales and tried to pass them off as true stories now have no idea how to package the truth!!!
@SpiritmanSF, I've lived with racism so long that the only thing that surprises me today is that people don't recognize it when they see it, speak it, or hear it.
@greenheron...I actually felt pangs reading your comment, do real & insightful.
It's about the roles that are available to women of color and the roles that are considered "prestigious" enough for recognition by AMPAS. And the fact is that women of color (African American, Asian, Latina, etc.) are as diverse as white women. The roles offered to them and the performances that are singled out for recognition should reflect that. But they don't.
That being said, the Academy does seem to nominate and hand out a lot of awards to those who play "noble" roles, regardless of race, especially actors/actresses who portray disabled people, or those who play a historical or real-life figure (biopics).
I think a big part of the problem is racism. I also think some of it just laziness.
A link to Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer talk to Oprah about the criticism of "The Help"
For me this issue is tightly intertwined with the issue of women in film...all women. I like films about women, and color doesn't determine the draw. Women crave the reflection of our complexity and strength in film. If the characters speak to me, my time watching in the dark theater was well spent. Toni Morrison has been one of my favorite writers since I was a youngster, for the unforgettable characters she creates. They're like poems. I'd relish Sula brought to the screen. Imagine Viola Davis in that role. Wow.
Finally, any narrative generated by white people about black people makes me squidgy. There was a male author a few years back, I forget his name, who wrote as if he was a woman, and got much press because he was supposedly so good at it. A man can't write about periods. He'd always be writing about something else.
Hollywood seems to underestimate the expanded audience that would result by bringing more diversity to the entertainment table, how offering wider choice would expand our viewer curiosity and tastes. Recently, I watched a Chinese war epic called Curse of the Golden Flower (full disclosure: borrowed the dvd because it starred Yun-Fat Chow, but still...), and learned all kinds of neat things about the 10c Tang dynasty, plus was treated to a narrative that dealt with epic human themes: love/betrayal/war/honor, in addition to juicy roles for women–two as mother/daughter warriors able to dispatch several dozen male adversaries at a time with only their swords. My initial bias was that Chinese warrior movies hold nothing for me, but I was wrong, and I was delighted to be wrong! Now I’m on the look out for more.
I loved The Wire for similar reasons, like a Shakespearean tragedy, or Greek drama: good people who are flawed, bad people who are noble, love/betrayal/war/honor, juicy roles for women and men, old and young, beautiful and not so beautiful. Police, politicians, union workers, drug dealers, educators, social workers, and journalists are heros and villains both. Life is a messy business, people are a mash up of violence, love, sex, politics. The Wire won very few awards from the entertainment industry, yet Harvard teaches a course on it. If you saw it, I would be interested in knowing what you thought. In any case, television seems to be expanding the possibilities, and hopefully, Hollywood will follow.
I knew zilch about this until yesterday.
Public Radio did a 'piece' and you help.
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