It’s February. Black History
Month you say? No. It’s Oscar
time. A time for all of the Hollywood
stars and starlets to get decked out and celebrate their wonderfulness in a
room that has the collective net worth larger than the GDP of a handful of
developing nations.
But this year’s award show has a little bit of a twist. A twist that fits perfectly during this month
formerly known as Negro
History Week.
We have two “Black” movies going head-to-head in the Best Picture
category: Django Unchained and Lincoln.
Mind you, I don’t think either movie will beat out the award season
sweeper, Argo, but imagine for a second the
Oscars decided to have a new category for movies set in the mid-nineteenth
century that had to do with slavery.
If you haven’t seen either of these two movies here’s a brief synopsis:
Lincoln is a (good and
accurate) historical movie set on the eve of the end of the Civil War in 1865
and Abraham
Lincoln’s push to pass the Thirteenth
Amendment of the Constitution to end slavery in the United States. It’s not a war “shoot-em-up” movie like the
opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, so some people
might get bored of the heavy dialogue and political narrative. Others might actually enjoy the acting. Who knew?
Lincoln is a movie that makes
White people feel good about themselves and what they did for Black people. I would put it in the same category as The
Help and The Blind Side. (Sandra Bullock should be happy that her
fictional son, Michael
Oher, just won the non-fictional Super Bowl.)
The Canadian equivalent would be if someone made a big budget movie
about Theresa
Spence in one hundred years that depicted how Stephen
Harper and Patrick Brazeau saved her from dying of starvation.
Taking a sharp left turn at “What-Makes-White-People-Cringe” street, we
have Django Unchained.
All the big hoopla around Quentin
Tarantino’s instant classic, Django
Unchained, starring the angry runaway field nigger (Jamie Foxx), the
brainwashed house nigger (Samuel L. Jackson),
the bloodthirsty nigger-hater (Leonardo DiCaprio),
and the nigger Jezebel (Kerry
Washington), may not come from the movie’s cinematic and historical
wizardry, but because of the insecurity and racism of an overwhelmingly
ignorant White audience.
Does my use of the word “nigger” make your toes curl up and sweat beads
start to form on your forehead? Did you
pause after I wrote “runaway field nigger” and start to question my political
correctness?
If you had no problem reading my brief synopsis on Lincoln, but felt like you were listening to a Drake record when it came
to my take on Django Unchained, then
you know one of the reasons why the Unchained Nigger could never beat out Uncle
Abe:
The word “nigger”.
Why did it make the White lady in the row in front of me cringe when
Whites called Blacks “niggers” in the movie?
Why did she cringe even though the word was used so much that you
thought there was some kind of tally amongst the cast members with the winner
getting a bottle of Aunt
Jemima syrup and a box of Uncle
Ben’s rice? Better yet, why would
some people find it offensive when during slavery the common reference of an
African-American or Black man was to call him or her a nigger?
The other reason?
Django – the runaway field nigger – won. He killed all the White folks and got his
wife back.
How can the White-man-killing Jamie Foxx compete against the
Black-man-saving Daniel
Day-Lewis when White people are still uncomfortable watching and accepting
Blacks dominating and beating Whites?
(Football and basketball not included.)
Think about when Denzel
Washington won the Academy Award for Training Day. He was a corrupt African-American cop while
White audiences could find solace and peace in the fact that he didn’t get a
chance to kill his White partner, Ethan
Hawke.
He was a comfortable stereotype that White people could accept.
Django? And the entire Django Unchained “Black hero”
storyline? Not so much.
When Django rides off into the sunset (he actually rides off into the
darkness, but the sunset gives for a cooler visual effect if you haven’t seen
the movie), are the people of the Academy thinking: “Man, now that is a Black
hero story worthy of an Academy Award”.
No.
They were hoping that Django just kept on picking cotton for a few
years and waited for good ol’ Uncle Abe and his Thirteenth Amendment.
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