One of the reasons Trayvon Martin’s death has struck such a chord is that his killing adds another young black man to a tragic pantheon that includes Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, and it gives the sense that learning lessons from one of these deaths doesn’t give us what we need to prevent the next one. Telling a young black man to respect the cops as the mother in Bruce Springsteen’s “41 Shots,” his remembrance of Diallo and now Martin, does doesn’t save that boy from a vigilante with a gun and the backing of a Stand Your Ground law. And it’s easy, because there are differences in these cases, to focus on them as individuals, rather than examining the sense of anger and entitlement that motivate both people like George Zimmerman and the cops who killed Diallo, and Bell, and Grant.

So in that light, I’m glad to see that a project from writer and director Ryan Coogler about the last day of Oscar Grant’s life is coming together, starring Michael B. Jordan, who should be considered a major, major talent, as Grant, and produced by Forest Whitaker. And I’m particularly glad that because Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer is involved, playing Grant’s mother, people will be required to pay attention to the movie rather than dismissing it as some sort of angry, marginal indie. The format of the movie will apparently follow Grant through the last day of his life, meaning that it will be framed in such a way to build sympathy between the audience and someone who will be murdered by its end, rather than offering up a black man as a vehicle for the exploration of a cop’s psyche and morals.

And in a sense, Spencer’s presence will make a valuable point for audiences who see both movies: black families face the same risk of seeing their children legally murdered today that they faced sixty years ago. The risks are different in intensity, the avenues to pursue justice and reform somewhat more accessible. But they’re still there. The Help did a major disservice to its audience in adapting the book in a way that removed images of white violence against blacks, whether it’s the details of protagonist Aibileen Clark’s son’s death or the beating a young black man suffers for accidentally using the wrong bathroom that leaves him blinded. It was a movie that allowed white viewers to escape any complicity with racism, and then made sure they didn’t have to confront the most revolting consequences of racism either. Hopefully, this movie will honor Oscar Grant by making neither of those mistakes.

One of the most interesting and difficult parts of the debate over The Help, the Oscar-winning adaptation of a novel about a young white woman who documents the lives of maids in her Mississippi community, was over the appropriate role of white characters in cultural depictions of the Civil Rights movement. There’s no question that white people participated in the Civil Rights movement with great bravery, and in some cases were targeted for additional violence for the sin of siding with black protesters rather than white bigots. But there’s also no question that the Civil Rights movement is not the product of benevolent white liberals, and that it’s proper to acknowledge white participation in the movement as the work of allies rather than as progenitors. But pop culture likes telling stories about people who are at the center of the frame, frequently elevating allies to central roles. So what’s a well-intentioned storyteller to do?

I’ll be curious to see if Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave, an adaptation of a true story of a free man who was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and redeemed out of it through the hard work of his wife and a white New York lawyer, has some answers. Chiwetel Ejiofor is set to play the main character, Solomon Northup, Michael Fassbender will play the plantation owner, and Brad Pitt will play the lawyer who represented Northup. As much as stories of black empowerment are critically important to tell, it’s also important to illustrate the depths of white brutality, and to acknowledge that in a deeply racist system, there were certain functions only white people could perform, and certain avenues that they had privileged access to.

But even so, I still want my Harriet Tubman biopic.

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob, Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on NBC’s Community explains what she and her fellow black female actor friends do when someone asks them to play “sassy”:

As a black actor, it’s refreshing that I’m not playing the “sassy black woman.” It’s something that Dan Harmon was cognizant of from the beginning. It is something that I’m always cognizant of. Every woman on the planet has sass and smart-ass qualities in them, but it seems sometimes only black women are defined by it. Shirley is a fully formed woman that had a sassy moment. Her natural set point, if anything, is rage. That’s her natural set point, suppressed rage, which comes out as kindness and trying to keep everything tight…Female friends that are in my tribe, black girls, we all have stories about that. We find interesting ways to make [directors] tell us to be sassy because they know that it’s racist. I say, “Can you show me how to do that?” They don’t want to do a black version of sassy, so then they move on.

I can’t even imagine how much pressure there must be to go along to get along when you’re trying to get a job or keep one, so the folks who are pushing back at all get kudos. And I think, just rhetorically, there’s something smart about playing uninformed in this sort of situation. It lets the person giving awful instructions know that what they want isn’t just an accepted default for everyone. And it forces them to acknowledge they’re asking folks to do something they’d find embarrassing and artificial to carry out themselves—if they’ve got a whit of shame or smarts.

I also think Brown’s discussion of Shirley’s anger is really important—and it’s what’s the key to what made Octavia Spencer’s Oscar-winning performance as Minnie Jackson so good in The Help. Minny is full of justifiable rage, whether it’s at the husband who abuses her and their children, the employer who treats her dreadfully, or even sometimes at the white lady who thinks she has the presumption to tell Minny’s story honestly. The pursed lips and sarcastic remarks that make the character funny aren’t really for anyone else’s gratification. They’re an escape valve for the anger it would be so dangerous for Minny to express directly.

Even before Meryl Streep, playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, beat Viola Davis, in a performance as a Mississippi domestic even The Help‘s detractors couldn’t help admire, for Best Actress, it was a racially awkward night at the Oscars.

The off notes began when Billy Crystal resurrected his Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonation for a Midnight in Paris sketch at the beginning of the show. The bit is just fine, but on a night that featured Octavia Spencer and Davis as acting nominees for The Help, and Gabourey Sidibe reflecting on how few women like herself she sees on-screen, it was an unfortunate reminder of how few parts are available for actual African-American actors. It didn’t help when, later in the telecast, Crystal joked that after seeing The Help “I wanted to hug the first black woman that I saw, which from Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” It might have been a crack on white, wealthy Los Angeles residents, but the joke didn’t have quite enough self-awareness about the persistence of segregation.

That same unease showed up in an otherwise very funny sketch about Hollywood focus groups that featured a group of cranky moviegoers dissecting The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know that it was unintentional, but an attendee played by Fred Willard kept talking about how he’d love a movie with more monkeys in it—and suggested the upcoming Gone With the Wind would benefit from the same additions. It was an unfortunate choice, pairing up that particular animal with the movie for which Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Academy Award. As Chris Rock reminded us, “If you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.”

And the awkwardness wasn’t all black and white. Daniel Junge, who won an Academy Award for Feature Documentary for Saving Face, announced that as a white guy, he really ought to get out of the way for his Pakistani collaborator, journalist and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy—and then kept talking, though he did let her have the majority of the time. The biggest missed opportunity of the night was the Academy’s chance to recognize Demian Bichir’s marvelous performance as an undocumented immigrant in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life, a profoundly personal issue movie that went underwatched this year. I don’t begrudge Jean Dujardin his Best Actor win, but it’s much more interesting to confound the Academy’s preconceptions about the people who are still acting as the help than it is to cater to their nostalgic self-conception.

There’s been an awful lot of furor over Spike Lee’s declaration at Sundance, made with justifiable anger (and to my mind considerable accuracy), that Hollywood doesn’t know much about black people and doesn’t much care. The response to that statement, and a couple of other recent incidents, really seem to make clear how correct Lee is, and how loath the industry is to acknowledge his fundamental correctness.

Even before he got to Sundance, the Hollywood Reporter framed a Q&A with him by saying that Lee discussed “what he sees as a dearth of influence among African-Americans in Hollywood.” That kind of framing makes a fact seem like an opinion. During the Q&A, Lee asks his questioner multiple times to name an African-American in the entertainment industry who has the power to greenlight a movie, and the only person THR can come up with is an animation executive. All the studies of race and gender representation in the industry show that people of color are dramatically underrepresented in directing, writing, and producing positions. The only way that Spike Lee’s observations about race and Hollywood are an opinion rather than a fact is if the industry consensus is that it’s fine for people of color to be underrepresented in entertainment relative to their actual presence in the population. And if that’s the case, I’d really rather someone in Hollywood say that up front than listen to folks pretend that getting racial and gender diversity in positions of power is important to them.

And I think a lot of people in Hollywood want to believe they’re squarely committed to racial justice, or at least proportional racial representation. You see that in Charlize Theron trying to buck up Viola Davis after the latter says that not looking like Halle Berry makes it harder for black women to get good roles in mainstream entertainmentby telling Davis that “You have to stop saying that, because you’re hot as shit,” a statement that asks Davis to ignore the assumptions that have measurably governed her career and suggests that self-esteem can overcome institutionalized racism.

You see that in the affection for The Help, a perfect example of the kind of movie that Red Hook Summer co-writer James McBride is talking about when he says, “Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid.”

But complaining about this, even for 30 seconds, which is about as long as what the press has called Lee’s Sundance “rant” or “tirade” lasted. As McBride put it in that same essay, “When George Lucas complained publicly about the fact that he had to finance his own film because Hollywood executives told him they didn’t know how to market a black film, no one called him a fanatic. But when Spike Lee says it, he’s a racist militant and a malcontent.” The easiest way to marginalize a truth that would require you to make genuine changes if you accepted it is to marginalize the person telling it, to make him out to be crazy, or extreme, or whiny, or demanding rather than justifiably angry. That’s what’s happening to Spike Lee. Journalists should be thoughtful about what kinds of perceptions they’re abetting, and whether they’re framing the reaction to the Red Hook Summer session, or the reaction to The Help, or any other discussion of race in Hollywood in a way that’s the best representation of the truth, or a representation of a mass mentality that’s running scared.

By Daniella Gibbs Leger

I knew this day would come. As expected, the great Viola Davis has been nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her starting role in The Help. And as expected, I am deeply conflicted about this. On the one hand, Viola has reached the rarified air of the very few black actresses to be nominated for the top role. A past best supporting actress nominee, Davis is one of the best working actresses out there, often doing so much with so little screen time. This is an honor she more than deserves.
 
But, and you knew there was one, she is nominated for playing a maid. Insert very large sigh. What is it with Hollywood and giving award nominations to black women who play a certain role? The maid, the abused woman, the whatever Halle Berry was in Monster’s Ball. There’s an underlying theme of victimhood that runs through all these wins. That’s not to take away anything from the actresses of the roles they played, but you have to wonder what affect this has on the way black women see themselves.
 
A new ground breaking study from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation released this week paints a complex picture of black women in America. Over all, they are happy with their lives, are concerned about racism and worry about providing a good life for their children. One area of concern was how black women were portrayed in media – both news and in pop culture. That’s not really surprising. Who would have thought that the ’80s and ’90s would be the heyday for portraying blacks in a variety of ways on both TV and the big screen? Movies ranging from Coming to America to Do the Right Thing to The Best Man showed a range of African American life that is missing now. As one of the survey respondents expresses in the Post, “black women are too often viewed as flashy, provocative, eye-catching – imagery that makes her cringe.”
 
One would think that as our country becomes more diverse, it would be easier to find diverse stories told in movies. But the exact opposite is happening. George Lucas has been vocal about how difficult it was to get Red Tails to theatres. And after the success of last year’s Jumping the Broom, you would think Hollywood would be clamoring to make more movies like that. Sadly, they are not. They are still most interested in finding the next comic book movie to make and maybe a Tyler Perry film here and there.
 
As I’ve written before, I have a complicated relationship with The Help. I thought it was a well-acted movie and was entertaining. The subject and substance ticked me off. But then Octavia Spencer’s Golden Globes acceptance speech was moving when she quoted Dr. King saying, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.” And for those reasons, I’m filled with mixed emotions about this nomination. Because for all of the problems with The Help, I have to acknowledge that it’s not like Hollywood is throwing leading roles to women of color on a regular basis, if at all. I hope Viola (and Octavia!) wins, but I also hope we get to see a future where black women get recognized for a greater variety roles.
 

So, I haven’t seen absolutely everything that won Golden Globes tonight, but I’ve seen a lot of them. And I am very, very happy for Claire Danes and the lovely folks behind Homeland, and very, very irritated by the victories for The Descendants, though George Clooney could have won a directing award for Ides of March, so things could be worse. But if you want to know why you should—or shouldn’t—check out the winners, or just need some water cooler talking points when you head back into the office on Tuesday, I gotcha:

TV Series, Drama: Homeland
Actor in a TV Series, Drama: Kelsey Grammar, Boss
Actress in a TV Series, Drama: Claire Danes, Homeland
TV Series, Comedy: Modern Family
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Downton Abbey
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV: Idris Elba, Luther
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Motion Picture, Drama: The Descendants
Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama: George Clooney, The Descendants
Supporting Actress In A Motion Picture: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Director: Martin Scorcese, Hugo

And seriously, watch Luther everybody.

I think Jeff Labrecque may be technically correct here that there are few women in Hollywood who gets to have careers that are as multi-faceted as the best careers for men. But I still find the idea that not being “limited by those constraints” applied to women means that Stone is like a dude:

There have been many other actresses who have experienced similar success at her age, 23, but Stone seems to be a different creature. Even when she’s cast as The Girl, she’s never been limited by those constraints. From Superbad to CSL, she’s imbued what might have been clichéd female characters into something indelibly richer. And as she increases her clout, she’s finding the unique roles that enhance her growing stardom without making her a prisoner of any specific genre or pre-fab persona.

I guess what I’m getting at, and I mean it as a high compliment, is that Stone is a dude — in the sense that she is building a career typically allowed to only serious actors in Hollywood. Guys in the industry unfairly get more leeway, whereas actresses are so easily boxed in at an early age, and few have been allowed or earned the freedom Stone currently enjoys. She can literally do anything, and she’s getting opportunities to prove it in period dramas, high school comedies, adult romantic comedies, and comic-book epics. She’s on her way to becoming a lucrative brand, an ironic but nevertheless well-deserved achievement considering her multiple talents and eclectic taste.

I actually think it’s more apt to suggest that Stone is on a trajectory to escape the permanent girlhood Hollywood foists on most actresses. Limiting actresses to stories that pit jobs v. love as if they’re a choice, or that makes the question of whether or not someone is the One isn’t just a female thing, or what femininity is made up of. Instead, it’s a way of trapping actresses in the black-and-white terms of teenagedom, of walling them off from the full range of problems and joys women get to experience. If there was one thing I liked about The Help it’s that it’s a love story where the female lead chooses her career over her dude and feels absolutely no ambiguity about it: racial justice is more important to her at the moment than romance or respectability is. Women aren’t just wives and mothers and people with jobs: they’re citizens.

The bridge is yours.

-I really hope George Lucas doesn’t decide to be a jerk and shut down a proposed Death Star PR series.

-I hated The Help, but Viola Davis is definitely remarkable in it.

-I will watch anything Katee Sackhoff is in.

-Louis C.K.: predictably smart about what winning an Emmy would do for him and FX.

-The more the adaptation of The Hunger Games emphasizes its critique of reality television, the happier I will be:

As much as I really, profoundly disliked and am discomfited by the rapturous reception The Help‘s received in some critical quarters and at the box office, I’m less interested in the badness of this particular piece of art, and more interested in why we keep making Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement movies, and how we can get something different in production. Turns out, all it takes is Brad Pitt, who is adapting Twelve Years a Slave, the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped, held in slave pens in Washington, DC, and sold into bondage in Louisiana. Chewitel Ejiofor (who I love, though I wonder if it’ll make a difference that he’s British rather than American) will play Northup.

I really hope this comes to fruition. We’ve see Martin Luther King Jr. biopics, including Paul Greengrass’s account of King’s support for the striking Memphis sanitation workers and his assassination getting pushed back repeatedly. And McQueen and Ejiofor were supposed to be working on a Fela biopic too, and it’s not clear what happened to that. But it would be so useful and powerful to tell a story like that that explains that the direction from slavery to freedom wasn’t always a one-way journey, that demonstrates the reaches of the vast jaws of the market for slaves, that situates bondage not just in a vanished, Spanish moss-draped Deep South, but on Mall in Washington, DC where we inaugurated the first black president.

There’s a white character in Northup’s story, the Canadian carpenter who smuggled Northup’s letters back to his wife so she’d know what happened to him. But if he comes into the story and departs it through Northup’s narrative, rather than having a movie that follows said white carpenter South and has him discover Northup, I think this movie can avoid a lot of The Help‘s problems. It’s not the existence of good white people in stories about black people that’s the problem. It’s the presumption that their goodness is the most important takeaway from anti-slavery and Civil Rights narratives.