Black Actors Can Be Just OK, Can't They?

There is probably no way that a movie about Martin Luther King can be reviewed fairly in a climate where he is canonized, or even deified, by his adherents.  This makes it a bit odd that the movie "Selma" received only a nomination for Best Picture (tough competition; there are eight nominees) and none for any of its actors for Best Actor/Actress nor Best Supporting Actor/Actress.

Naturally this immediately became a racial incident of Fergusonian proportions.  Although no one tried to point out any of the specific performances as being great enough to merit nomination, it was a good opportunity for the racism industry to jump all over it.  Maybe especially because there weren't any great performances; it's easier to scream about institutional racism; there you can be more vague.

Al Sharpton immediately -- I'm not making this up -- headed to Hollywood (on whose nickel we don't know) to "call a meeting" to protest the exclusion.  A meeting of whom, he did not say, but my first thought was to ask who was going to sit with him.  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?  Clint Eastwood?  Al did not say.

But this is decidedly not about Al.  Consider the following letter to the editor published Monday in the Washington Post.  It reads, in part:

"In denying the movie “Selma” best actor and best director nominations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences again seems to have used claims of historical inaccuracy as a cover [“Hollywood’s most notable Oscars snub: Diversity,” front page, Jan. 16]. The 1999 movie “The Hurricane,” starring Denzel Washington, met a similar fate. A couple of people vigorously lobbied academy members, criticizing the movie for its supposed inaccuracies."

The Post has lately been publishing a few too many letters not worthy of a paper of the Post's prestige, in that the connection between the point made and the example does not exist.  In this case, the whole point is completely missing.

The letter-writer delivers a total strawman, maintaining that the reason the actors didn't get nominated was because of claims of historical inaccuracy.  But that's ludicrous -- if the Academy folks were going to deny a nomination because of historical inaccuracy, it would have been the Best Picture Oscar nomination that was denied, not the acting Oscar nomination!  I don't necessarily credit the leading lights in the Academy with great intelligence or insight, but surely they are astute enough to have "punished" the producers of the flick if they were historically inaccurate, not the actors.

Unfortunately for the letter-writer, the messy facts get in the way, and that pesky Best Picture nomination that "Selma" actually got simply shreds the argument.

Still, we haven't heard the last of Al Sharpton on this.  Moreover, in a very clever ruse, the protestors have immediately rendered the Best Picture vote as a binary "Selma vs. Everyone Else and If You Don't Vote for Selma You're a Bigot" race, rather than an octonary, equivalent race among eight nominated films to have been treated equally.

"Selma" is going to win Best Picture, not because of its quality (which did not include enough good performances to gain a single nomination for a performer), but because the racism industry has ensured that a plurality vote divides the Academy voters into the "perceived bigots", i.e., those who vote for any of the other seven films, vs. the "enlightened."  And the Best Picture Oscar that will be won by "Selma" will have an asterisk the size of Idaho attached to it.

You can take it to the bank.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton