Damn Woke Oscars Won't Let Richard Dreyfuss Play Blackface Othello Or Even Shaft
The Academy Awards' new diversity requirements make Dreyfuss want to 'vomit.'
The Academy Awards have a known diversity problem. A recent survey found that only six percent of nominees have been people of color, and women of color account for just two percent of total nominees. This is also a result of the films that are produced and the stories that are told. Most Hollywood films feature and center straight white men.
The Academy is working to address this issue with new regulations that take effect for the the 2025 Oscars. According to the Academy’s new regulations, which will come into effect for the 2025 Oscars films seeking best picture nominations must meet two out of four requirements.
From The Guardian:
The requirements include having at least one lead character in the movie be from an “an underrepresented racial or ethnic group”, having at least 30% of the general ensemble cast be from at least two underrepresented groups (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people or people with disabilities), or having the movie’s subject focus on one of those groups.
This is not difficult if you are truly telling a story about human beings who exist in our current reality. The Guardians of the Galaxy series meets all the requirements and those movies aren’t even set in our galaxy.
However, there was predictable backlash from people who insisted these requirements would ruin cinema. Bill Maher was, well, Bill Maher about the whole thing, but recently PBS "Firing Line" host Martha Hoover asked What About Bob star Richard Dreyfuss what he thought about "these new inclusion standards for films?” He replied, “They make me vomit.” (That's apparently his colorful way of saying, "I disagree.")
“No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is," he said, as if diversity and inclusion are fads like parachute pants and the Macarena. "What are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life and I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”
This isn’t about “hurting people’s feelings” but supporting efforts that ensure productions have a diverse cast and crew. That’s a form of morality we can “legislate.” You can continue to make films with a cast whiter than a Wes Anderson movie, they just won’t get showered with awards. Note also that so-called “Black” films such as Get Out and Wakanda Forever are still more racially diverse than Woody Allen's cinematic universe where Black people somehow don’t exist in New York.
It was inevitable, but Dreyfuss proceeded to whine about blackface.
“Laurence Olivier was the last white actor to play Othello, and he did it in 1965,” Dreyfuss said. “And he did it in blackface. And he played a black man brilliantly.”
No, Olivier played a guy with an English accent who murders his wife. His shoe polish-induced skin condition does not make him Black.
“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man?" Dreyfuss said because no one loved him enough to stop him. "Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?”
Art is also the search for truth. You might say that is art’s first duty. There is no truth in Blackface. The Othello argument is especially pathetic because it’s one major role out of all the roles Shakespeare wrote. It’s the one where race is specific to the plot. That said, I do appreciate Patrick Stewart’s version of Othello where he remains white and everyone else is Black. Othello is still an outsider and Blackness is presented as the default.
Dreyfuss would be poorly cast as Othello even if we were still slathering white actors in black greasepaint. Maybe he imagines that wokeness alone has deprived audiences of his performances as Walter Younger in A Raisin in The Sun or Troy Maxson in Fences .
In reality, Dreyfuss, like many other white actors, benefitted from a forced lack of diversity in film. Dreyfuss was born in 1947, around the same time as Charlie Robinson, Ernie Hudson, James Avery, Glynn Thurman, Joe Morton, Danny Glover, Gregory Hines and Ben Vereen. Just a few Black actors from around that period who would’ve been great in Jaws or Close Encounters of The Third Kind.
Dreyfuss whines about the few roles specifically intended for Black actors without considering that so many of his own roles were implicitly exclusive to white actors. Casting directors probably never even met Black actors for the roles that made Dreyfuss famous.
He told Hoover that the new Academy requirements are "so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”
Yes, someone is definitely acting like a child here.
[ Los Angeles Times / The Guardian ]
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So 1965 is going to be our barometer? Excuse me?
I agree that art is art and greater regulation can be detrimental to free expression.But if I read correctly, the regs are for Best Picture nominees. And Dreyfuss' response implies some sort of expectation to be nominated. As if the purpose of creating a film is to win an award.