The unfurling of the line-ups for the Venice and Toronto film festivals signal that awards season is upon us. Among the usual mutterings about this finally being George Clooney’s year and Meryl Streep being destined to pick up yet another nomination, there are several stories about black stars and directors being touted for Oscars.
First up is Lee Daniels’ The Butler (pictured) (the Weinstein Co had to add the director’s name to the title when Warner Bros claimed ownership over The Butler). The 53-year-old has Oscar form – Daniels directed Precious, which received six nods in 2010, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Mo’Nique. Daniels also produced Monster’s Ball, which won Halle Berry a Best Actress Oscar.
The film stars Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker as White House butler Cecil Gaines, who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986. The actor also has a role in the adaptation of the Langston Hughes musical, Black Nativity.
Musicals often find favour with Academy voters and this Christmas tale also stars Oscar-nominated Angela Bassett, Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson and Mary J Blige.
What weighs against Kasi Lemmons’s film about a Baltimore teen sent to spend Christmas with his New York-based grandparents is that recent black musicals such as Dreamgirls have failed to capture the imagination and the director’s uneven track record.
In addition, Whitaker is also a producer on Fruitvale Station, a film about the death of Oscar Grant, killed by a policeman on New Year’s Eve in 2009. The film won plaudits at Sundance and Cannes and director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B Jordan are being fêted as the next big things in Hollywood.
The British are also in on the act. A likely Brit in the running for a Best Actor gong is Chiwetel Ejiofor. The star plays slave Solomon Northup in Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Northup’s auto-biographical text, 12 Years a Slave.
It is McQueen’s most main-stream work and the black British director could also be stepping up to the Oscar plate.
Ejiofor is also in Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, about the struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria.
Another British actor tipped for an Oscar is Idris Elba, who plays Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. It’s directed by Britain’s Justin Chadwick, and long gone are the days when black film-makers would complain about white directors telling their stories. Positive discrimination is no longer needed as more black film-makers have emerged.
The New York Times went so far as to call this “a breakout year for black films”. In addition to the awards-bait, Spike Lee is helming a big-budget remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy starring Josh Brolin and Samuel L Jackson. Tyler Perry has a new film out and there is a sequel to 1999’s Best Man.
It’s easy to see why there is talk of a renaissance. After all, last year the only film from a Hollywood studio made by a black director with a black cast was Sparkle. There was also a low-key indie release from Spike Lee, Red Hook Summer, with Lee grabbing headlines for rallying against Hollywood.
But calling this a breakout year ignores black American film history, which has had several so-called breakthroughs – Oscar Micheaux – the first black American director – in the Twenties and Thirties, the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s or the start of the black American indie scene with Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It in 1986. Then there were the gangster films after John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood or comedies like House Party.
Such analysis also fails to recognise the success black film-makers have had in recent years. It’s worth noting the many actors mentioned who have Academy Award nominations and wins.
A proclamation of a renaissance is problematic because it ignores what are still major problems for black film-makers and actors: the studios remain uninterested in making black films and still rarely cast blacks in lead roles; the list of Oscar contenders is full of prestige pictures financed outside of the Hollywood system on low budgets.
The result is that Hollywood is increasingly out of touch. – The Independent