I WISH IT WAS MORE THAN HIDDEN FIGURES

Another year of introspective review of artistry is probably how the more than 6000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would critique this year’s Oscars ceremony.  Even with Hollywood’s self-portrait as liberal, inclusive and a global repository of diversity and multicultural narratives, it always strikes me how the mosaic of black life in this country that is celebrated in film falls within a dystopic stricture of  grating dysfunction, marginalization and an existential threat of violence.

Slavery, civil rights and the slums is the corner store of ideas from which our American-ness can be transcribed.  A twenty-first century rendering of us as sentient beings is still representative of the glacial pace at which anecdotal offerings of the historicity of black people is being integrated.  The Birth of a Nation, after much pre-Oscar fanfare, was not only conspicuously absent from the list of nominees, but the polemic subject matter in light of the Dickensian political tone of the nation was unfortunate. For the first time ever, a black man won for best screenplay adaptation in Moonlight.

The rhetorical question is whether this particular effort was so substantially superior to the legions of others over the many decades before it that it singularly and finally warranted a statue? O.J: Made In America garnered an award and was considered by some critics a magnum opus of our culture on the issue of race and ambition.  What it masterfully chronicles in the seven and a half hour documentary is an existential dissociative disorder masked as ambitious assimilation. 

Ava Duvernay’s “13^th” graphically, pedantically and compellingly dispels the myth of the abolition of slavery legislated by the 13^th Amendment of the United States Constitution. It exposes the pathos and ethos that drives, nourishes and sustains the carceral state in this country.  It however, falls outside of the bandwidth of heralded discourse and content to be found in the black cinematic trinity (slavery, civil rights, slums) of Hollywood green-lighted projects.  Changing the tapestry of cinema to a more expansive, “blackish” diorama has everything to do with appetite and efficacy. 

Because our history is inextricably and violently interwoven into the broader conflicted, passion play of establishing a democracy, extracting stories that promulgate fully-evolved Americans of color comes with inherent risk.  Movie making has always been a collaborative environment.  The stakeholders may come with a holistic intent of exhuming the lives and biographies of those who were wantonly disregarded, but the financial viability always holds sway.  If the American cultural epicenter for cinema is going to be compelled to do more than tangentially mine the trace elements of black culture, then the voices, perspectives and eyes behind the camera, within the corridors of power must also be inclusive or this self-aggrandizing “awards” show will in short order return to its regressive mean of monochromatic expression.