Hollywood – In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first black male to win the Academy Award for a leading role: best actor for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.”
Fast-forward to 2007, and the race for Oscars in the key acting categories included five black actors: Forest Whitaker for “The Last King of Scotland” and Will Smith for “The Pursuit of Happyness” for best actor, Jennifer Hudson for “Dreamgirls” for supporting actress, and Eddie Murphy for “Dreamgirls” and Djimon Hounsou for “Blood Diamond” for supporting actor.
Progress? It depends on how one views the term, say academics and other Hollywood observers, even with Hudson and Whitaker winning Sunday night.
Black actors have been front and center on Oscar night in recent years, particularly the evening when Halle Berry became the first black woman to win for best actress, or when the Academy Award for 2005’s best picture went to “Crash,” which featured an ensemble cast as diverse as the real-life Los Angeles culture it depicted.
“That was a great movie because it looked like Los Angeles,” recalled Judith Moreland, an actress and adjunct assistant professor of theater at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Poitier provided white America in that era with “a wonderful, idealized version” of the black male but had an uncanny ability to take a role that could easily have fallen into stereotype and “invest his own life into it and bring many layers to it,” Moreland said.
Now, she said, “audiences see movies and they don’t really think, ‘He’s black, she’s Latino, or she’s Asian.”‘
But the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the Academy Awards don’t reflect the dearth of blacks in the rank-and-file of show business jobs.
“While I feel joy for those outstanding performances, my concern is that people will take these as substitutes for progress,” he said.
Howard Suber, professor emeritus and co-founder of the producers program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and author of the recent book “The Power of Film,” said that when Hattie McDaniel beat out “Gone With the Wind” co-star Olivia de Havilland for supporting actress in 1939, it was because Hollywood wanted to make a statement.
“I don’t think there is any statement being made in any of (today’s) nominations,” Suber said. “The people are being nominated because of their talent and the quality of their performances – and they happen to be black.”
