David Oyelowo: ‘We don't give black and brown actors the chance to fail’

A new BBC documentary explores race and Hollywood in the wake of Moonlight’s Oscar win. The actor, along with other film-makers, asks whether that moment actually made a difference

“There’s a mistake. Moonlight. You guys won best picture. This is not a joke. Come up here.” The fiasco of the 2017 Oscars, when retro musical La La Land was initially, erroneously, given the best picture statue, was unfortunate beyond the unbearable cringe of the mix-up itself. The kerfuffle obscured the fact that Barry Jenkins’s coming-of-age tale about a boy growing up gay in Florida had just made history: a film with an all-black cast, with a story not about racism or slavery but simply contemporary black people’s lives, had won the Academy’s top prize.

It’s the watershed moment that opens Black Hollywood: “They’ve Gotta Have Us”, a new documentary series by the artist and photographer Simon Frederick. The three-part oral history of black cinema replays that Academy Awards debacle, then spools back to laud cinema’s original black trailblazers. Moonlight is to some extent presented as the full stop at the end of a story about a fight for representation. So was it a new dawn or is there much more work to do? What happened next?

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yO1NQi