The Oscar Whiteness Machine
The Oscars almost never get it right. Alfred Hitchcock never won one; Elaine May has never won one. Barbara Stanwyck never won an Oscar; Robert Mitchum never got a Best Actor nomination. The intersection between the art of movies and the Oscars is coincidental at best. Many great black actors have won Academy Awards (most recently, Forest Whitaker was named Best Actor in 2007, Halle Berry won Best Actress in 2002, Lupita Nyong’o was Best Supporting Actress in 2014, and Morgan Freeman got the Best Supporting Actor award in 2005). Many more have been ignored (Alfre Woodard was nominated once, in 1984; Danny Glover, never). Yet the blinding whiteness of the Oscars this year meshes with another infuriating long-term pattern: the whiting-out of movies about black experience.