Lensing Black Faces: Why the Bradford Young Snub Stings

Manuel here taking the MLK holiday to discuss the cinematography category in terms of its aversion to honor black faces.

Young on the Selma set

Amidst all the outrage surrounding Selma’s near-shutout at the Academy Awards (nabbing only two nominations in Best Picture and Best Original Song), the focus has been on Ava DuVernay’s absence in the unsurprisingly male best director lineup and David Oyelowo’s absence in the unsurprisingly white best actor lineup. I want to focus today on Bradford Young’s absence in the best cinematography lineup. Had Young been nominated, he’d have been only the second African-American black D.P. [Ed. Note: thanks for correcting me on this crucial distinction, Ian & 3rtful] to be nominated for an Oscar (the first and only so far is Remi Adefarasin, nominated for his beautiful work on Elizabeth). Of course, this also reveals the systemic lack of diversity that TFE bestie Jessica Chastain brought up just last week at the Critic’s Choice Awards. Can you really focus on this type of statistic without addressing larger institutional issues? Not really. Or rather, not constructively. And so, rather than focus on this one snub which is already quite disappointing given Young’s rising profile, I wanted to know what it might tell us about the academy’s reticence to celebrate D.P.’s that lens black faces.

I’m never satisfied with the way I see my people photographed in movies. I think it comes from a lack of consciousness – if you grew up in a community where you don’t know black people, I wouldn’t suspect you would photograph them in a concerned way. - Young on the Politics of Lensing Black Films

The Academy, as it turns out, has been rather skittish about nominating directors of photography who have worked with the type of canvas Young so skillfully paints with in Selma. Indeed, several films with predominantly black casts have been on the hunt for a cinematography award before, sometimes coming quite close to landing that coveted distinction... 

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The Links

The Wrap Emily Blunt is joining Charlize Theron to double the evil sorceress perfection that terrorizes Chris Hemsworth in The Huntsman. Now I suddenly want to see it.
MNPP Whatever happened to Sean Maher (Firefly). Jason has the answer 
Vulture John Travolta without his hairpiece. Ditch it permanently, John. Bald is beautiful. Or at least more beautiful than pretending you have hair (you did have a great head of it) when you no longer do. 
THR Michael Keaton in talks to star in a "gritty" drama from John Lee Hancock (who, tbh, we don't associate with "gritty" since he made The Rookie and The Blind Side*) called The Founder about the rise of McDonalds and behind the scenes shady business. It sounds like there are three good male roles so I wonder who will join Keaton? Can I put in a request for Edward Norton. I want them to become a new movie duo - so great together!
THR Good idea, Tom Cruise. Reuniting with your Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman. That was your best movie in ages 
The Stake on the 10 most profitable movies of 2014: horror, comedy, YA and even two heavily CG movies  

 

Oscar Oscar
Wired fact-checking Oscar morning outrage tweets 
The Dissolve the "Critics Choice" Awards righting Oscar wrongs. (But, in fairness, true fact: we voted before the nominations so these achievements are entirely accidental) 
Cinesnark is angry about the Selma snubbings -- a feeling which is going around and which will definitely in the future, no fuck that, RIGHT NOW make the Academy look bad -- though I would actually disagree on one point: I don't actually think the Screenplay deserved a nomination in that, I think there were five better. The movies power is in its direction, staging, cast, and feelings of immediacy despite being from the past. I think the screenplay actually has a few clunky bits.
Interview Jennifer Lawrence interviews Eddie Redmayne. I love this bit:

REDMAYNE: Do you ever watch dailies? 

LAWRENCE: No. Unless I keep getting the same note and I'm obviously not getting it, then I'll watch it again on the monitor. But, oh my God, did you watch rushes of this? 

REDMAYNE: We sort of had to, because we were jumping in and out of all these different time periods and trying to track the illness and the physical decline. I had an iPad with all the documentary footage of Stephen and then we had the dailies. I kept hoping that the two things were going to meet, but obviously they never did. [laughs]

It's fun to remember occasionally that big stars are actually directed and get 'ur doing it wrong' notes, isn't it? 

Old But Not Stale!
Slate details how a bad Jennifer Aniston movie turned into an Oscar Cinderella story. Really interesting piece except for that this Cinderella got stuck living with the stepmother Prince Oscar never found her with that one shoe. 
Nick's Flick Picks I never read Nick's annual liveblog until I've fully moved on from my Globe coverage because it's just too intimidatingly funny. It's my dessert that I have to force myself to wait to devour. This is my favorite part at the moment:

8:56: I feel like it's brutal to transition immediately from the Affair producer's advocacy for "how important our marriages are" to Catherine Zeta-Jones's entrance. But CZJ does brutal plenty well herself. "They're having a well-deserved party" is unmistakably a Welsh phrase meaning, "These bitches need to get out of my light!"

*This is not meant as snark. I liked The Rookie a lot. It's just meant as "he's not a gritty director"

The Five Stages of Grief via Oscar Nominations

Though Oscar nomination morning is my Christmas -- the day I anticipate so heavily each year when all the prezzies are ripped open -- it's not all happiness. Oscar also gives out lumps of coal on this day each year. Let us celebrate five big snubs (or omissions if you hate that word) representing each stage of grief so that we can work through it and move on.

Though SELMA got a Best Picture nod, it was ignored in every other category but Song

DENIAL I'm pretending that American Sniper, a conservative leaning (though not unartful) celebration of war heroism didn't crash the party late and win a ton of nominations (which encourages the studios to do that December/January glutting) while the progressive Selma -- which we actually need unlike a film about someone who's good with a gun! -- couldn't muster up more than two nominations.

ANGER Ava DuVernay, who would have been the first woman of color nominated for Best Director, should have been among the five Best Director nominees. She handled a large scale historical film and made it reverberate with danger, grief, inspiration, courage, and immediacy which is more than can be said for most historical epics. And it's only her third film! Can't wait to see what number four is like. As a subset of this stage of grief: anger. The Oscar nominations are just another reminder that Oscar does not value female narratives, not behind the scenes or onscreen. Movies about men trying to find themselves, or redemption or triumph over adversity score. Movies about women or people of color doing the same things do not (see: Wild and Selma, this year and examples in many other years; Oscar is a boys club)

BARGAINING The Lego Movie which I felt would meet more resistance than it initially had because it is basically a 2 hour commercial was nevertheless a surprise omission. I hope this doesn't discourage future filmmakers from going above and beyond because, YES, it was a commercial for toy product but it was like the best long-form commercial ever. So much funnier and more stylish and surprising than it had any right to be really. So next time someone overachieves Oscar, toss them a bone okay?

DEPRESSION All year long we (correctly) heard that it was a super strong year for Best Actor and it was. So why is the actual shortlist so disatisfying? Two answers: you could call Carell (against type / prosthetic nose) without even seeing the picture (and if you see the picture it's a heavily stilted performance and you can label Bradley Cooper a "default" nominee now with three consecutive nominations and though he's definitely under this guy's skin, it's a very unchallenging star turn compared to the snubbed competition.

This year of all years isn't time to lean on gimmicks or default status. Not when you had Ralph Fiennes's gloriously civilized sly performance keeping Grand Budapest Hotel grounded in gravitas and culture and wit when it could theoretically have defaulted to diorama kitsch. Not when Jake Gyllenhaal is doing the best work of his career in Nightcrawler. Not when David Oyelowo is becoming a great Southern orator. Not when... etcetera...

This was very disrespectfulACCEPTANCE Jessica Chastain missed out on a nod for what may well be her best screen performance yet in A Most Violent Year. But the film arrived very late and just didn't catch on quickly enough. And people got hung up on the Pfeiffer/Scarface look and missed the fact that the ubiquitous actress was doing interesting things with a more complicated character than her entrepeneur's wife first appeared to be in clip form.  (For what it's worth Pfeiffer also missed a nomination for Scarface, one of her many awful snubbings.) But we know that Chastain, who makes three movies a year and most of them high profile, will be back so we'll let this one slide. 

Who and what would represent your five stages this morning?

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Who you gonna call? Linkbusters

Vanity Fair Melissa McCarthy and other funny ladies in talks for Ghostbusters reboot. I'm rooting for Jillian Bell myself who is mentioned. Yay.
Buzzfeed a definitive ranking of Disney Prince butts - as great as it sounds though I'd place Prince Phillip higher because my imagination works (I love that former Prince BD Wong even replied to his ranking on Twitter)
Vulture let us all worship Charlize Theron who has demanded (and been given) equal pay to her male co-star for The Huntsman. It's not like people went to the first movie for Hemsworth...Insane. Sexism by the numbers.
The Film Grapevine Birdman and the unexpected virtue of Contrivance
A Socialite Life Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone photobomb someone actually trying to take a photo of them

Slate on why Wes Anderson movies have never been popular with the Academy Awards before (presumably) now. Fairly good reasoning
MNPP Wet Hot American Summer will become a Netflix series and the original cast is all returning
RogerEbert.com on the women in Selma: the unsung heroines of the movement
THR Samuel Goldwyn Jr dies 
Theater Mania The Color Purple is coming back to Broadway (already?) with Jennifer Hudson as Shug 

Good Long Reads
IndieWire great piece on the definitions of patriotism and exceedingly pro-gun messaging of American Sniper. Please do not let this film be nominated for Best Picture. It's just not what we need right now...especially given how many people have been killed by guns lately in the States...and still no gun reform.
Grantland Wesley Morris on Selma. Love this sprawling, provocative review / thinkpiece. I've been totally appalled and confused myself at the way the media has latched on to the Lyndon B Johnson depiction but Morris makes a great point here that helps clarify, for me, the anger and nitpicking:

A quick survey of film history suggests that the depiction of racial themes in America has always been the province of white directors, whether it’s something as spectacularly diabolical as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or the antebellum revenge of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. These great-man movies tend to reflect the aspirations and identities of the people who make them, which is how so many stories ostensibly about black life wind up with white interpolators. DuVernay understands the fraught, imbalanced legacy a film like this pulls her into, and she’s been as fair as she needs to be. This is not a film that undermines or questions Johnson’s ultimate contributions to the improvement of black life in this country. (It very easily could have mentioned the two decades in Congress he spent opposing civil rights legislation.) Inasmuch as there are villains, they are Wallace, Hoover, and Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. But because this isn’t Johnson’s story, those accustomed to seeing the president as hero (or protagonist) ultimately seem dismayed by how little of the president there is here.

The bold is mine, not Morris's. People who are angry about Lyndon B Johnson's depiction really ought to look beyond the myth and think about reality. And once they do, rather than be disappointed, they should be as generous as DuVernay is who depicts him as an imperfect man who makes a great progressive decision which changes history.

Meet the Contenders: David Oyelowo "Selma"

Abstew continues his weekly look at acting contenders as their films open...

David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma
Best Actor

Born: David Oyetokunbo Oyelowo was born 1 April, 1976 in Oxford, England

The Role: Filmmakers have been having a dream of bring a film about civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. to the big screen for years now. And this particular story, not a traditional cradle to tomb biopic of the man, but focusing on the Voting Rights marches in Selma, Alabama in 1965, has been in development since 2007 when British screenwriter Paul Webb completed his script. Various directors had been attached at one point and it was almost made in 2010 by Lee Daniels, who dropped the project due to lack of funding and to make The Butler instead. It finally comes to us from writer/director Ava DuVernay, who could make history by becoming the first African-American female director nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

British actor David Oyelowo had been attached to play Dr. King when Daniels was on board to direct (the two had previously worked together on The Paperboy and again in The Butler). And it was Oyelowo who suggested DuVernay to the producers after they worked together on her 2012 film, Middle of Nowhere. Oyelowo has stated that when he read the script back in 2007, that God told him he would play the part. [more...]

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