a repost
And as much as I was panting for BLACK PANTHER to win at the Golden Globes, I knew a superhero movie was a long shot --especially since the stars are all black folk.
But GREEN BOOK winning instead?
Yet one more white redemption movie winning over the blackest movie I've seen in a while is just like the Hollywood White Elite choosing DRIVING MISS DAISY over DO THE RIGHT THING.
* * * * *
headline
How 'Driving Miss Daisy' Became One of the Most Scorned Best Picture Winners Ever
“When Driving Miss Motherf—-ing Daisy won Best Picture, that hurt,” director Spike Lee told New York Magazine in 2008. “[But] no one’s talking about Driving Miss Daisy now.”
The filmmaker is hardly alone in his disdain for Bruce Beresford’s 1989 Oscar-winning adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play. And in fact, the few discussions that Daisy inspires nowadays often begin — or end — with a question: Was this the worst Best Picture selection ever made?
The choice caused controversy and skepticism even at the time, with the New York Times asking if the film had a “subtext that summons up a longing for the good old days before the civil rights movement.” And in the 25 years since it was released on Dec. 13, 1989, Daisy’s reputation has hardly improved. So how did the divisive little movie manage to win the most prestigious prize in cinema? And does it deserve the scorn it continues to attract today?
...In fairness, it has its moments of complexity, most notably in the film’s best scene, as Hoke attacks his employer’s hypocrisy over not inviting him to attend a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. But on the whole, it’s a soft-focus, mostly unchallenging Stanley Kramer-esque take on...
race relations with a simplistic and rose-tinted view of the past...
I've said this about a number of movies and television shows. I'm going to say it again. If GREEN BOOK had come out in 1981, maybe this movie could be seen as a progressive race relations movie. But this came out in 2018.
All GREEN BOOK reveals about our real world in the United States is how stuck white Americans are on re-shaping their racist past. That has to be what plucking the most rosy stories they can find about race relations are about.
It's not that all movies about race relations have to end in hopelessness. It's just that movies about white racists and regular black folk (not watered down, superstar-black folks like GREEN BOOK's Don Shirley) have to show racism being as ugly as it is.
If you had blinked slowly three to four times during GREEN BOOK you'd miss the fact that Viggo Mortensen was playing a racist at all. And I think that's what white audiences loved about it.
I wound up watching this film with what seemed like all white senior citizens. The theater was packed too...in the late afternoon, when the gray hairs usually show up in force at the first matinee.
That said, except for a few strongly cringy moments, it was entertaining --even to me.
The whiten-folk of the gray hairs clapped at the screen when it was over, and did so for a long time -- which probably makes them representative of the same white people who voted for DRIVING MISS DAISY and DRIVING MR DON SHIRLEY (GREEN BOOK) for best picture.
And you know what?
Now that I think about Mortensen's very peacefully racist role -- especially considering he was kind-of a hood rat in the movie-- I'm going to say I was wrong. This movie would not have worked as a progressive race movie even in 1981.
That said, except for a few strongly cringe-worthy moments, it was very light and entertaining. And if I didn't know what a Green Book was and how it came to be a life saving tool for blacks in the south (it didn't just save black folks embarrassment and mean-talk from racists like it did in the movie) I wouldn't have been angry when I left the theater.
Yet I could have enjoyed the movie more
if I both (a) didn't know what the Green Book was
and had also (b) taken 3 or 4 long blinks, as described above. In this way, I'd have missed Viggo Mortensen being a racist altogether and everything would have been coming up disney for me too -- just like it did for the white audience.
And that's why this white redemption movie won the Golden Globe for Best Picture.
But whiteness through rose colored glasses is never a good thing for white audiences. Never. And this is important, because it is white people who have a white supremacy problem to recover from -- and movies like GREEN BOOK drag white folks, as a group, backward instead of forward.
