New York Times columnist David Carr joined a media chorus chastising the Academy Awards membership for declining to nominate “Selma” for more Oscars at a time when the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York have been prominent in the headlines for several months.
“The news continues to be full of all manner of pathology and victimization involving black Americans,” Carr, who covers media, wrote in his latest column, “and when a moment comes to celebrate both a historical giant and a pure creative achievement, it merits significant and broad recognition.”
“Selma” hit theaters across the U.S. on Jan. 9. It tells the story of epic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Though the film received widespread media coverage and was generally well-received by critics, it received just two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Song. Some in the media saw it as a slight, given the film debut’s close proximity to the Brown and Garner incidents, both involving the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers who were not indicted for any crimes. (Both officers maintained that they acted within the law.) The lack of nominations for “Selma” left a dearth of minority actors and actresses up for awards.
In his column, Carr accused the Academy of “blindness.” That prompted New York magazine editor-at-large and former Times columnist Frank Rich to tweet, “exactly right.”
Last week, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton called the two nominations “appallingly insulting.”
“In the time of Staten Island and Ferguson, to have one of the most shutout Oscar nights in recent memory is something that is incongruous,” he said.
“Two [nominations],” wrote Stephen Crocket, an editor at the black-centric left-leaning website The Root. “That’s it, for a movie whose social message couldn’t have been more relevant in a post-Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter push for social change than if it had been preordained by a minister.”
The movie’s tie to real-life events in Ferguson and New York isn’t by coincidence. In interviews and premier events to promote it, director Ava DuVernay and the cast, which includes Oprah Winfrey, repeatedly referred to both Brown and Garner as examples of ongoing racial tension in the U.S.
At the film’s New York premiere in December, the cast wore shirts that read “I Can’t Breathe,” a rallying cry for protesters who saw Garner’s chokehold death as an act of police brutality.
“It’s very dangerous for a historical movie to try to tie itself to current events,” Pete Hammond, who writes on film awards for Deadline Hollywood, told the Washington Examiner media desk. “Because you can’t always control the way those events are going to go and it can wind up taking you off message.”
Hammond said the “Selma” crew may have been perceived by Academy voters as needlessly politicizing the film by linking it to Brown and Garner.
“This is not a movie about Michael Brown,” he said, “or police reform, and when you do start to put current events on a movie that’s not about that, you’re suddenly putting it in a different sphere and you’re open to not being able to control the events.”
Hammond said the decision to link “Selma” to incidents involving police who killed unarmed black men may have backfired after two officers were killed in December by a man who claimed to be retaliating for the deaths of Brown and Garner.
“It changed the dynamic of some of what was happening before,” he said.
Hammond also referred to another issue that likely had an impact on how critics received “Selma” and that was how President Lyndon B. Johnson, widely considered a civil-rights hero, was portrayed in the film.
“The very fact that that came up with people who worked closely with LBJ was a problem,” Hammond said.
The controversy over LBJ’s portrayal in the film began with a Washington Post column submitted in late December by Joseph Califano, LBJ’s top assistant for domestic affairs in the late 1960s.
“[T]he film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself,” Califano wrote. “In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea.”
Califano concluded in his piece that the film “should be ruled out … during the ensuing awards season.”
The criticism was echoed by Post columnist Richard Cohen, who called the movie’s underlying moral lesson “a lie” and said should “Selma” win an Oscar, “truth loses.”
Maureen Dowd, another columnist for the Times, said the same. “[T]he truth is dramatic and fascinating enough,” she wrote over the weekend. “Why twist it? On matters of race — America’s original sin — there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.”
One Academy voter told the Examiner that such a factual distortion, so much as there is one, would sway his vote.
“Critics should not consider “timeliness,’ but it inevitably happens,” said Peter Bart, the former editor in chief of Variety. “Especially if, as with ‘Selma,’ there are historical disagreements. I am an Academy voter but I acknowledge that factual distortions in biopics influence my opinions.”
