History Repeats Itself.

The 1990 Academy Awards are often remembered for their Best Picture race – the award ultimately went to Driving Miss Daisy, with many since saying that the Academy should have nominated and awarded Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Do the Right Thing challenged its viewers, suggesting that racism was still alive and well in America, and some would say that it encapsulates the black experience. Unsurprisingly, it launched the career of Spike Lee, who is perhaps Hollywood’s foremost black director. Do the Right Thing told the story of race riots caused by tumultuous race relations, and remembered as a the first hit in the career of a great director. On the other hand, Driving Miss Daisy is not lauded in the same way. The movie is about Morgan Freeman’s character Hoke Colburn who learns to appreciate his older, white, mildly racist employer.

One movie suggests racism can easily be solved if blacks just appreciate whites, the other suggests it’s much more complex than that.

Daniel O’Brien, formerly of Cracked.com, described Do the Right Thing’s critical reception over time rather succinctly in this video: “Historical perspective: white critics were confused why Spike Lee would make a movie about race riots in 1989 – less so, a few years later when the L.A. Riots happened [in 1992].” Which brings us to the modern day.

After the 2019 Academy Awards, in which Green Book beat Blackkklansman, that Best Picture race was compared Do the Right Thing’s loss to Driving Miss Daisy.

In 2019, among the nominees for Best Picture were three movies which prominently featured black characters; Green Book, Black Panther, and BlacKkKlansman. They’re three very different films, and have three very different depictions of the black experience. Obviously, Black Panther is in a rather different category, and in this post I’m going to be considering that movie as much as the Academy did, which is to say not at all (because it’s a superhero movie). But Green Book and BlacKkKlansman both show very different stories about white-and-black relations specifically.

Green Book tells the story of a white body-guard working for a black singer-songwriter, and though they’re different, they get to know each other and grow closer as people, thus defeating racism. It’s inspiring, it’s lovely, it’s Oscarbait. On the other hand, BlacKkKlansman is much more combative by nature, telling the story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs police officer who went undercover to bust the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The connections between BlacKkKlansman and the modern world are explicitly spelled out, and they acknowledge this in what ends up being a bit of a downer ending: the Klan is still out there, and racism is still alive and well. The satisfaction we would get from watching Ron Stallworth succeed is undercut by the realization that his work is still not done – it wasn’t done in 1972, and it wasn’t done in 2018. It’s still not, in 2020.

There are debates that can be had about which of these four movies are better, but the pattern is noticeable. Two movies about the black experience are nominated for awards, and the one which wins more is the one that can make Americans feel comfortable at race relations – little do they know, racism and riots are less than two years away.

The one necessary detail which really puts the decision into perspective is the fact that the Academy is a large body made up of many, many people, rather than one small group or single critic making a decision. I could easily see how individual Academy voters could be lulled into voting for a feel-good story over one that challenges them. We hold them up to a higher standard, but they’re no different from everyman theater-goers in that way.

I don’t mean to share this post to say that the world would be a radically different place if Do the Right Thing or BlacKkKlansman had won, or that it would have prevented all of the police brutality we’ve seen recently, but I just wish the Academy could do more to recognize movies that challenge us and push us out of our comfort zones.

In my senior year of college, the Fall of 2016, I was writing a paper about depictions of POC characters in television, and in my reading, I came across an academic paper about the topic from 2009. The paper, written shortly after the election of Barack Obama, suggested that racism was vanquished, because a black man was president. What would race be like now that there was no racism? When I read that paper, in 2016 as Donald Trump was stoking the fires of racism, I found that idea laughable. Now, I find it too foreign of a concept to even laugh at.

Thanks for reading – Black Lives Matter.