How white are the Oscars, really?

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With no black nominees in the acting categories, people declared the movie Selma was snubbed. People accused “Oscar” of being racist. People wondered why Kendall Jenner was spending so much time with Tyga.

Oh, sorry, that was not people, that was People magazine.

Well, yes, we all know by now that all the good actors in 2014 were white.

And perhaps this anger at the Oscars -- actually the other actors in the Screen Actors Guild who vote for people they feel may be deserving of an Academy Award -- should be directed at the black actors.

Perhaps the actors sucked.

Maybe it was the writers and directors.

Perhaps the material was weak.

If you were to get Denzel Washington to play Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything, it might be a different story. First of all, that’s a movie everyone in the world would go see. I mean, seriously. Denzel would be one badass science nerd-slash-genius-slash-tough-ass-mother-flucker. 

Denzel Washington as Stephen Hawking

But, more importantly, would "Oscar" have "snubbed" him the way they did for his performance in The Equalizer?

We all know the answer -- it’s obvious...

Definitely not!

Had Chadwick Boseman who played James Brown in Get On Up! taken a turn in an all-black version of Grand Budapest Hotel, as directed by, say, Lee Daniels, would he and the others had been snubbed?

No.

Daniels proved his expertise as a director with “The Butler.” In that film, based as closely on a real-life White House butler’s life as Guardians of the Galaxy was on the life of NASA’s Buzz Aldrin, Daniels showed us the parallel but divergent paths of Black America. He was so generous a director, he did this about 37 times: The butler serves a nice dinner for the president, the son goes to a sit-in; the Butler meets heads of state, the son gets arrested; the butler pets a kitty cat, the son argues with Black Panthers. It’s really not completely ridiculous and overblown at all.

And not nearly as ridiculous as making Oprah’s wife-of-the-butler character a cheater, a drunk, depressed, and any other Oscar-likely emotional state.

Which brings me to my point: The Butler was not snubbed. (Admittedly, EW wrote about this last year. http://www.ew.com/article/2014/01/27/butler-oscar-snub-lee-daniels) No...wait...that was my point last year...

My point this year is this: Maybe the movies with the black actors in them suck. Maybe the actors suck.

Now, I’m not going to pretend I can judge such things. I’ve not studied acting, nor have I studied directing. But, more importantly, like most of the academy, I’ve not seen Selma, Get On Up, or that artsy film which starred Halle Berry that almost nobody has heard of.

The Oscars aren’t about race. They’re about the zeitgeist. Whatever wave is moving through Hollywood will be embraced by the academy voters. Last year it was in-your-face art like 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, or -- to a lesser degree -- Captain Philips.

This year it’s the art of filmmaking -- new ways of telling stories filmically: Birdman (the phony continuous 1-take surrealist film), Boyhood (based on the concept of the famous documentary Seven-Up), Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson doing what Wes Anderson singularly does, but doing it slightly better than -- and with weightier prospects -- than usual).

Clint Eastwood was snubbed, and I haven’t heard one person shout, “Does Oscar hate old guys?” (No, it doesn’t) or “Does Oscar hate Republicans?” (Hells yeah.) The fact is, Eastwood’s American Sniper is garbage.

But, wait, Bradley Cooper was nominated. Yes, because his performance was incredible. There was absolutely no sign of Bradley Cooper in the portrayal of depressed murderer, under-appreciated (by Michael Moore) soldier, and Jesse “That Old Body” Ventura-hater Chris Kyle. Can we say the same of David Oyelewo?

I don’t know, I didn’t see Selma.

Nor did anyone in the Academy. 

But it's possible that his portrayal of MLK was not great. It's possible that he didn't capture what we the audience know of MLK at all. It's possible that the director forgot to give the audience some way to understand that King wasn't just the guy who sermoned "I have a dream" and was a multi-dimensional person with a more quiet and just as powerful demeanor when not speechifying, and it's very possible that whoever that person was, we didn't see him portrayed via directing, or the acting, in any way we the audience could buy.

But, you know, it's so hard to say since I didn't see the movie. 

 

Don’t blame the game, blame the players: If Oscar wasn’t racist last year, it likely wasn’t racist this year. If the Academy’s president for the last several years is a black woman, can we really say they’re racist?

No, what we can say is that the reason there’s no diversity in the Oscars race is BECAUSE THERE'S NO DIVERSITY IN HOLLYWOOD!

Well, Michael Keaton, it turns out, is 1/25 Cherokee.

You want diversity? Movies starring black actors other than Kevin Hart need to be made and seen. And while they don’t need to be good, they need to pretend to be good. That’s how nominations are made.

Denzel in a wheelchair, man...Denzel in a wheelchair.