We May Need The Bloscar

I don't know why we should depend on Oscars.
How did Toni Morrison get her Nobel Prize for Beloved? The Black literati in New York judged Beloved the best of American literature for the year in which it was published. The establishment for The National Book Award gave the green light to something other tome.
I think black people go to the movies to remain informed about mainstream culture. I don't believe
we are particularly entertained.

Hollywood makes plenty of movies with black people.
We've had mammies whose heads are tied in rags.
I loved Butterfly McQueen though in Gone With The Wind. How many times has her famous line
been my theme song for so many occasions? "I don't know nuthin bout birthin' no babies!" She will
always be my girl for that.
We have had young women beaten to a pulp because they are not white- but look white enough to
merge into white society.
We have had black drivers of little old white ladies.
We have had beautiful black starlets willingly mauled by Billy Bob Thornton in the movie, and
unwilling so by Adrian Brody when the lady received her 'oscar'.
We have had the most brilliant, the most versatile actor, possibly in the world today, subject to bullet
overkill in the last scene of his movie, to the extent I had to leave the theater before the bullets stopped flying into what would have been left of the man's body.
We have had one of the most brilliant female actors in America today playing a mammy who
struggles with her lot with dignity passed over for an 'oscar' for one who plays a domestic who defecates in family pies. I know when you have to go you have to go. But do we celebrate that, or gets so titillated by it we have to reward it?
We have had wonderful butlers, esteemed by of all people- Nancy Reagan. Yay!
We have had a vengeful ex-slave looking for his wife, finding her naked in a hole in the earth.
When my daughter went to see Twelve Years A Slave the theater was full to the brim with white people- the theater never full of white people. I'm not knocking it. We all need the education.
But we did get to see the stories some of us already know. A young girl, played by a real African woman, must be raped, smelly, and beaten as a way of life. A man played by a real African, finds his freedom is only as real as the color of his skin- not his papers.

Are those of us not involved in media all nuts? Are we actually supposed to be interested in white
people telling the stories of what happened to us? If not-are we racists? I stopped seeing these movies
long ago, though I loved the professionals who had roles.
I loved Nurse Betty. Thank you so much Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock!
I love anything Charles Lane made.
Boys In The Hood was so sad, but did express the director's life experience.
What could have been better than Menace To Society? 'Whachu say 'bout ma mamma?!'
and 'Why you come 'roun heah so God-damned urleh?!'
Those are my guys. What?
And even though black actors are not featured in Scarface, black men know almost every word
uttered in the film. The story rings culturally authentic.
My nephew knows every word in Friday. Chris Tucker couldn't have been better.
And in 'Money Talks', even the white people were as funny as they could be.
I don't know why some think black people find the same things as funny as white people do.
My parents might like Bob Hope. Dad would turn to Dick Cavett. But they didn't really love humor
until I played Richard Pryor's first album for them. They admitted he was speaking their 1930-1950
lives.

I don't know from maids and butlers and wayward cops unless I'm watching Downton Abbey or
Serpico, or maybe The Godfather, though my mom hated the glorification of mob activity, and I soon
slipped into her way of viewing after I turned thirty.
So we need our own Bloscar. I don't know if the films, or the ethos would crossover to commercial
success. But hey, we have culture, for good or for ill- we need to film it when we can.
As it is, most movies seem to me to be reduced to white people being brave, being, kind, being
powerful, being full of romance, being wonderfully super-human, etc. etc. etc. Most of it is
so terribly boring.
Black people in movies are props, mascots for the kind, the wonderfully super-human, the romantics, the powerful, unless it is a movie about the weaknesses in African American culture.
That seems to be fine if the movie is made chiefly by black people, because the characters are more
fully in a culture. They have parents, homes, other relatives, black friends, etc. But right now...

Stephen Speilberg has the rights to Dr. Martin Luther King's speeches, so Selma offers a lot of
inauthentic Dr. King rhetoric.  And there was no available good enough African American actor whose recent ancestors were born and raised in America to play Dr. King.

We keeping searching for ourselves in Hollywood, because after all, we built an America all
immigrants could come to, and Hollywood is in America. Without the enslavement of my ancestors,
there would have been no place for 'your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free',
(Yearning to be free to eat). There would only have been the starving settler colonists from Europe, unwashed and unwanted at home, yearning to escape prison and/or neck-stretching in the Old Countries.
Miles Standish was barely literate, and he was one of bright ones.
But everyone who comes to America (except President Obama's dad, of course ) comes here to be white even Africans.
No one has come here to become a part of our community. We are 'those people'. And to be
fair, we don't rush to inclusivity. People new to America are warned away as soon as they arrive.
And even if they weren't- why would they become a part of us? We 'got a passel o' troubles'.
Selma did what it could, I'm sure; but so what it didn't get the 'oscar' it probably deserved? We need
to worry about whether it deserved a Bloscar.