The pale grey Oscars are unfair and boring

“WE all dream in gold,” says the official 2016 Oscars poster. The dreaming may be in gold, but the nominations are most definitely in white, while the boycotts are in black. It’s as if that other dream, the one Martin Luther King had, never happened, writes Suzanne Harrington

While black performers are welcome to compere and entertain the audience at the awards ceremony, it is only the white performers who are deemed worthy of the actual gold prize.

But does it matter? After all, it’s just films, right? Made-up escapism to divert us for an hour or two in a comfortable darkened space where we temporarily forget ourselves and become immersed in the pretend lives of others. From grizzly bear attacks to interstellar warfare, it’s all entirely trivial, fictional, unreal.

Except it’s not. While cinema can comprise fantastical storylines involving monsters and disasters and superpowers, the fact remains that the stars of our films — Lassie and Miss Piggy aside — are human. And humans come in a glorious colour palette which extends all the way from palest pinky-beige to deepest bluey-black — so why is this not reflected in the movies, unless it’s a ‘black’ movie? What’s with the white-skinned blue-eyed thing? Isn’t it a bit, you know, samey? A bit boring? A bit unrealistic and non-representative? A bit racist? A lot racist?

Aside from ‘black’ films in the ‘urban’ Spike Lee-type genre, black actors have only ever been allowed to play supporting roles in ‘white’ films — from Mammy in Gone With The Wind (where at the Oscars ceremony Hattie McDaniel was seated away from the white actors, having received special permission just to be inside the whites-only hotel) to Jennifer Hudson’s chirpy, cheery sidekick role in Sex & The City, the movie.

Black actors can be kooky, wise, mystical, humorous, thuggish, sporty, or servile — but they can’t be the main character. Not in a white movie. And this year, they can’t even get nominated. For anything.

It’s racism against white people to complain about this, complained white actor Charlotte Rampling.

Is it? Is it really? Yet there were no black or Asian nominees at last year’s Oscars either. Does this mean blacks and Asians are just not as good at acting as whites? Because that’s the message that the Academy is sending out, two years in a row.

It’s like 1939 all over again — and even after Hattie McDaniel won her best supporting Oscar for Mammy, she was then cast as a maid 74 more times in her career. Has Hollywood really changed that much since then, beyond an unconvincing veneer of lip service to equality?

The people who vote for which films and actors are nominated for awards, and which films and actors will go home with a funny gold statue are 94% white, 76% male, and with an average age of 63. This is where the problem lies — not with a lack of black or Asian talent, but with the stale white male domination of its appraisal. How can such a creative industry remain more conservative than an investment bank?

Boring, boring, boring.