Watching the comedian-actress Mo'Nique receive a standing ovation for her best supporting actress Oscar win on television Sunday night was something akin to déjà vu for me. Instantly, I was taken back to 2003 where I sat in the same Kodak Theater watching both Denzel Washington and Halle Berry win best actor and best actress. Whoopi Goldberg was the host and the king of any ball, Sidney Poitier, was holding court upstairs—seemingly pulling all the right strings for things to go perfectly.
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What a night. Berry became the first African-American woman to win the best actress Oscar and Washington became only the second African-American man to win best actor, after Poitier. Berry won for portraying an angry black woman with a husband on death row and a child so overweight she beat and chastised him before his death. Washington won for a playing a crooked, thuggish cop—but still, a new chapter in black history had begun: African-Americans were finally being recognized and awarded for their work in film.
A more diverse selection of "our stories" was sure to follow right?
Not so much.
This must be said: Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe gave wonderfully flawless performances in Precious, a touching but incredibly disturbing film about an overweight, young inner-city girl abused by her mother and molested by her father. They both deserved every nomination and award they received. Lee Daniels directed the film, as he has with many others, with the skill and compassion that guaranteed a best director nomination. My issue is not with them or any minority performer, save for being a part of only the stories Hollywood deems interesting enough to tell.
Defenders of the film have rebuffed the criticism of Precious. They argue that attacking its stereotypes and mainstream popularity is unfounded, given that the story is very much a reality in many inner-city African-American homes across the country. Unfortunately, it is a story that is all too familiar—but it's also one that's well known to all American households, thanks to its ubiquity in pop culture.
This article again show the connections between economic, political and cultural power. The lack of power to greenlight films in Hollywood (economic power) is determining which stories get told (politics and culture). Despite the great power blacks have in these other two spheres, this article points out the Obama book was published at the same time as the book that became the movie Precious; and the impact of hip hop on popular culture is visible everywhere, across the the world---- not having the final authority to decide what gets on the screen, decides what we see on the screen.
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