I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [51]
As happy as I was that night for Denzel and Halle, I guess the thing that disappointed me the most is that this was, what, the seventy-fifth year of the Academy Awards? After all this time it’s a big deal that a black woman and black man win Best Actor and Best Actress? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s sad. It’s sad to be even having this discussion. It’s like I said about people making a big deal about Tyrone Willingham being hired as head coach of Notre Dame. If this is a big deal in 2002, we’re in trouble. Same goes for black actors winning an Oscar in 2002.
If you don’t think prejudice is alive and well, that Oscar night is a damn good reminder. I know there are great white actors and actresses who’ve never won an Oscar. Bob Hope never won an Oscar. But none of the great black actresses had ever won one, and Sidney Poitier was the only black actor to win one. Then again, it’s probably difficult to be considered for the Oscar when all you get to portray is a junkie, a drug dealer, a pimp or a hoodlum. What kind of choices are those? I think Brad Pitt has a few more choices than that, doesn’t he? But where are the choices for Morgan Freeman? How come Morgan Freeman gets nominated one year for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, then you don’t even see his ass for the next two or three years in a meaningful role? How is it that Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson can be accepted by the moviegoing public one year, then have no choices of reasonable roles the very next year?
Seriously, it’s disturbing. The people who go to the movies don’t seem to care. They’re like sports fans in a way. If word is out that there’s a good movie, people are going to want to see it, no matter what color the actor is. Yeah, there are some racists out there who don’t want to see blacks or Hispanics or Asians in any mainstream role and don’t want their kids to go see those movies. But for the most part, you put good material out there and people are going to go see it. People who go to movies know Morgan Freeman is a great actor. It’s the people in Hollywood who don’t allow him to have any choice of roles. Man, Hollywood is worse off than sports when it comes to inclusion and diversity. There are no choices, no range of characters for black and Hispanic people.
And just think, Morgan Freeman and Denzel and Halle Berry have it better than just about everybody else. The rest of the brothers better be content to play a drug dealer, a gangsta or a playboy ’cause that’s all he’s getting to portray. Who is doing the casting for these movies and who holds them accountable? Who’s writing the scripts? At least in sports, people know the owner and the general manager and who is doing the hiring, and people can jump on ’em and insist that a league or a sport do better. In sports you tend to know who ought to be accountable. But how many of us know the studio head or an executive producer, and where do you go to make a damn complaint? I’m just so disturbed about this. I had a woman say to me one day last summer, “Charles, you’re doing well. . . . I know a lot of black people making money and doing well.” And I told her, “Yeah, I do, too. In the NBA.” People see a few black celebrities doing well, getting a chance to pursue their ambitions, and they think it’s that way across the board. Well, it isn’t. If it was, Halle Berry and Denzel winning those Oscars last March wouldn’t have been such a huge deal. And neither would Tyrone Willingham being named coach at Notre Dame. But what’s going on with the television industry and the movie industry is troubling, especially considering how much the people forgotten by those industries patronize them.
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My daughter can watch a little bit of television on school nights. But at 9:30, it’s going off. When I was growing up, we could watch a couple of hours of TV per night. But my grandmother said the TV was going off at ten, and that was