My last Green Book post... Maybe.
I was considering all the backlash over the #BrownBook win and feeling pretty good about myself when I realized one of the most glaring lies about the "racial reconciliation" message of this "well-meaning" movie.
And it's a BIG lie.
I'm 50 years old. Green Book is set in 1962. In other words, six years before I was born. The movie would have us believe that "Lip" Villelonga's "radical transformation" about race is a proxy for how society has changed in those 56 years.
Bruh.
The ACADEMY AWARDS hasn't even changed that much in the past 30 Years!!! Y'all remember the 62nd Oscars, right? (No you don't). 1989 was a year when movies like Glory, and Field of Dreams, and Born on the Fourth of July (which rewarded Oliver Stone as Best Director), and Dead Poet's Society, and a LOT of really good movies were released. Google it. You won't BELIEVE how many classics were dropped in 1989. For real. For REAL.
An Adam Clayton Powell documentary was up for an Oscar too. And another movie. An important movie. Arguably the masterwork by a director who was making movies that challenged America... mostly around issues of race.
That movie was "Do the Right Thing."
The movie was up for Best Screenplay that year. It lost to Dead Poet's Society. What it was NOT up for, as Kim Basinger so adroitly commented, was Best Picture. The winner? , "Driving Miss Daisy."
I'll pause so you can roll your eyes.
In 2018, there were an incredible number of films telling stories about Black people that were (gasp) created and directed by Black people. Beale Street, Black Panther, BlackKKlansman, Blindspotting, Sorry to Bother You, Equalizer 2, Widows, The Hate U Give... among them. Unsurprisingly, each dealt with tensions that Black folks face in their lives. These films are set across five decades—from the 60s to modern times and even the near future... But tellingly, RACIAL TENSION IS STILL THE ACTIVE AGENT THAT DRIVES THE DRAMA (less so in Equalizer, but still).
BlackKKlansman was up for Best Picture. Yet, 30 years after a folksy, homespun dramedy drove itself into Best Picture (and Best Actress for Jessica Tandy), the Academy ONCE AGAIN denied a movie that speaks the truth of that ongoing tension by rewarding ANOTHER movie about racial dynamics played out in a car.
Ye. Gods.
That's why Green Book's back-patting optimism rings so gratingly false. We're STILL HERE.. Black Lives Matter, MAGA, the resurgence of the Klan and alt-right and Neo-Nazis and the rest. We're STILL HERE!
Despite the platitudes of a screenwriter who centered his WHITE father in a movie named for a book written to protect Black travelers from discrimination and violence and whose ACTUAL lead character should have been the musical prodigy whose talent and ability prompted the damn trip in the first place... Dr. Don Shirley is a SUPPORTING character, while the Dad gets a nod as Best Actor.
REALLY?!?
GDFOHWDBS.
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