An excerpt from The New York Times -
What Does the Academy Value in a Black Performance?
When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, revealing that not one black actor was in the running, the resulting furor touched on the performances that critics said should have been considered: What about Idris Elba in “Beasts of No Nation”? Michael B. Jordan in “Creed”? Will Smith in “Concussion,” or one of the stars of “Straight Outta Compton”?
The uproar over #OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance? Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them.
These movies have a lot in common, not least that most were directed by white men. Only three were directed by black men and none by women. Perhaps these numbers aren’t surprising, given the well-known demographics of the film industry. Other numbers are more eye-opening.
Consider: In the history of the Oscars, 10 black women have been nominated for best actress, and nine of them played characters who are homeless or might soon become so. (The exception is Viola Davis, for the 2011 drama “The Help.”)
The first was Dorothy Dandridge, for “Carmen Jones” (1954). That musical drama, like the opera from which it derives, is mostly known as the story of a sexually rapacious young woman and her obsessive, ultimately murderous lover. But it’s also the story of a wily, prideful human running out of places to go. Late in the film, Carmen and her fugitive boyfriend hide out in a seedy Chicago apartment. There’s no money for rent, and soon they’ll be evicted. Carmen, who’s spent the movie working hard to seem carefree and fierce, tries her best to summon that look again as she sets out to scare up food and rent money.
Nearly every black best-actress nominee has faced a similar plight, right up through “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012), in which Quvenzhané Wallis played a little girl about to lose her home to a flood. No black woman has ever received a best-actress nomination for portraying an executive or even a character with a college degree. (Though Gabourey Sidibe’s character in “Precious,” from 2009, seems likely to get one eventually.)
All 10 performances for which black women have received best-actress nominations involve poor or lower-income characters, and half of those are penniless mothers. Two of the portrayals — Diana Ross’s incarnation of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972) and Angela Bassett’s depiction of Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (1993) — are of singers who enjoy a measure of wealth at some point. But Holiday begins broke, and viewers know she’ll end up that way, while Tina Turner doesn’t have money of her own until the film’s last five minutes. The remaining characters are maids, sharecroppers, criminal-drifter types, impoverished housewives and destitute girls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/what-does-the-academy-value-in-a-black-performance.html?hpw&rref=movies&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
