It’s Oscar season, and that can only mean one thing. Bitter actors, directors and producers suggesting that Hollywood’s circle jerk is out of touch with reality. Imagine— an industry that inordinately produces films about zombies, dragons, wizards and comic-book heroes being out of touch with modern life. Where do they get these ideas?
Well, if you’re Spike Lee and Black Lives Matter, you think the Oscars get these ideas from their deeply held racist beliefs. As you may have heard, Spike, Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and other black stars are boycotting this year’s Oscar ceremony because, for a second straight year, there are no major nominations for blacks. Lee points to movies like Straight Outta Compton as evidence that there were black-themed films available for awards.
Maybe. The idea that an academy based in the exclusive gated communities of Hollywood has a constrained world view is not beyond the powers of reason. However, the Motion Picture Academy has long made a point of its racial bonafides. There are people in Hollywood who still have sore elbows from patting themselves on the back for giving Sidney Poitier an Oscar in the 1964 for Lillies In The Field.
They’ve produced a string of historical films about the black experience to guilt white liberals into thinking, as Hillary Clinton now does, that reparations from slavery are due to blacks. If anyone in the white cultural community has had Spike Lee’s back it was Hollywood. But after Barack Obama worked his charm on racial matters tin America the past seven years, accommodation is no longer enough for the Lee and the Grievance Industry.
In case you’re not keeping score these days, the Martin Luthur King dream of a colorless society is deader than Tupac. What Lee and his colleagues now want is not equality of opportunity. They want equality of outcomes. Merit is out. Entitlement is in. Perhaps they need a black Oscar category.
A little math: blacks currently represent about 12 percent of the American population. Research shows that Oscar nominations for blacks is about proportional to that figure. Black winners of an Oscar run ahead of that figure. So the equality of outcomes bar is being met by the Oscars. It’s just that some years black nominees are below that average while in others they are above that 12-13 percent figure.
Of course, when this logic leads to what to do about an NBA or NFL (which is 70-80 percent black) things get a little opaque from Spike. Is there not discrimination at work here? No, no. According to Lee, those figures are merit-based. If whites can’t cut it, tough luck. Then there’s the disproportionate number of blacks employed in the government jobs like the post office. To black radicals, that’s just payback.