Read Editorial with D2G Ep – LXII

In Read Editorial With D2G
January 26, 2016

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EPISODE – LXII
TOPIC: Oscar whitewash
BLOG: The Indian Express
WRITER: Editorial
GENRE: Editorial

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MEANINGS are given in BOLD and ITALIC

It’s not unprecedented (If something is unprecedented, it has never happened before), but after two years running in which the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not nominated a single black actor for an Oscar, several artistes of colour are threatening to boycott the award ceremony this year. Others are asking their peers (Your peers are the people who are the same age as you or who have the same status as you) to get over colour issues, while Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs herself insists that greater representation is required. Instead of war, a discussion has broken out.

Roll back to 1975, when a five-year streak of all-white nominations began. No alarm bells rang. Hollywood’s limited palette (You can refer to the range of colours that are used by a particular artist or group of artists as their palette) was again highlighted in 2001, in Halle Berry’s acceptance speech for Monster’s Ball, where she dedicated her award to “every nameless, faceless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” It was admired for its boldness at the time but today, it would be deemed a routine element of the discourse (A discourse is a serious talk or piece of writing which is intended to teach or explain something). Because in the meantime, the quality of the discussion has changed. The Obama presidency was expected to deliver on foreign policy and welfare, but it may be remembered better for making the issue of race relations so explicit, so normal, that even the president of an embattled cultural academy can speak freely and honestly about it, in the public domain.

Indian politics should try to learn from this culture of openness, before our discourse collapses into a monologue. The nation is repeatedly confronting questions of difference, of categories. This week, a minister has tried to deny that the suicide of a student in Hyderabad had anything to do with the different treatment faced by Dalits. The national general secretary of the BJP is on a personal crusade against “anti-national forces” on campus. Earlier, the government had tried to smear (To smear someone means to spread unpleasant and untrue rumours or accusations about them in order to damage their reputation) intellectuals who were uneasy with it for giving divisive elements a free run. And cultural figures, including actors, who felt that they did not belong in today’s India were peremptorily (Someone who does something in a peremptory way does it in a way that shows that they expect to be obeyed immediately) told to pack off to Pakistan. Halfway around the world Spike Lee, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2015, has politely declined to attend this year’s award ceremony. No one has told him to pack off to Gambia or Guinea, or wherever they imagine his genetic origins may lie.

Jada Pinkett Smith, who is spearheading (If someone spearheads a campaign or an attack, they lead it) the movement, has not been accused of being anti-national. The US used to be derided as absurdly nationalistic but today, India could beat it hands down.

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