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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
It's important to note that awards mean nothing more than recognition: They can be recognition for bad work that for some reason appeals to the award voters just as easily as for work that's genuinely wonderful. But winning an award does raise an actor's profile, at least for the moment. For that reason, a major award means something different when it's given to an actor who's a member of a racial minority. For better or worse, producers and casting agents pay attention to awards. Berry may not get better roles if she wins the Oscar (it hasn't worked that way for Hilary Swank, after all). But getting a nomination is at least evidence that your colleagues know you exist, and it opens the door a bit wider for you and your contemporaries.
The question of why there are few good roles for black actresses is virtually irrelevant. A more significant question might be: How many roles in Hollywood movies actually need to be played by a white woman, and a white woman only? In a Scripps Howard News Service article written by Dave Mason earlier this year, actress Sherri Shepherd, who had a role in the short-lived TV show "Emeril" and has also made guest appearances on "Friends," explained that there have been days when she'd have just one audition to go to, while the white actresses around her would grumble about having to go to two or three. "I wouldn't say it's discrimination," Shepherd said in the article, referring to the shortage of work for black actresses. "They don't think the part is for an African-American. For a lot of roles, the breakdown is for a white woman. They need to expand their thinking -- maybe an Asian woman, maybe a black woman can play it."
One problem is that there are so few people of color in positions of power in Hollywood. But raising that issue simply raises another question: Why should it take more black power brokers to raise the profile of black actresses? That only lets the existing white studio executives off the hook. Why should they need to have their arms twisted to consider a black actress for a role in which race is of no consequence?
The Hollywood power structure thinks it has a pretty good idea of what audiences will and won't buy in a movie, and it believes that audience standards are fairly rigid and slow to change. But there's no reason even the most conventional minds can't be nudged into more daring territory. Thandie Newton was cast as the love interest opposite Tom Cruise in "M:I-2," a casting choice that Cruise reportedly fought for, to his credit.
Whatever problems audiences may have with interracial romances on film are beside the point. (Very often, in fact, it's black women who object most strongly to them, notably in situations where black men are depicted with white women.) At the very least, the romance in "M:I-2" -- which wasn't presented as an interracial romance at all -- recognizes that in life and in love, we don't always match ourselves up along color lines. Now that one of America's most white-bread movie stars has shown that he's keenly aware of the racial inequities of Hollywood casting, what's everybody else's excuse?
Slowly but surely, we're seeing more interracial romances in the movies, among them the relationship between Nia Long and Giovanni Ribisi in "Boiler Room" (in which the characters' racial differences are never an issue) and that between Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in "Monster's Ball" (in which the characters' racial differences are the whole issue). But even if you view these depictions as small triumphs, they still continue to attract the wrong kind of attention, and from surprising sources. In his recent New Yorker review of Randall Kennedy's book "Nigger," the critic Hilton Als derides the interracial romance in "Monster's Ball," claiming that Berry plays "a white man's idea of black female suffering -- nothing too overwhelming or internal."
Worse, though, is the way Als characterizes Berry's features as "distinctly European." In other words, she's not black enough to count as an official black person. Perhaps he means that audiences would be too shocked by a relationship between a darker-skinned woman and a white man, and thus he believes Berry's casting represents a failure of nerve. But that overly generous reading doesn't even begin to answer the question of why Als himself (who is African-American) stoops to the thinly veiled bigotry of measuring degrees of blackness. If that's his line of thinking, should Lena Horne be considered less black because racist men of the '40s and '50s found her skin light enough to be acceptable in the movies?
