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The Oscars (which Chris Rock once called a "million white man march") have increasingly served as celebratory breakthroughs in Hollywood's racial ceiling. For 2001, two black actors won the top acting prizes for the first time: Denzel Washington ("Training Day") and Halle Berry ("Monster's Ball"). Dual wins for Morgan Freeman ("Million Dollar Baby") and Jamie Foxx ("Ray") followed for 2004, as did the combination of Whitaker ("The Last King of Scotland") and Jennifer Hudson ("Dreamgirls") for 2006. But those tipping points were followed by more incremental progress. The 2011 best-picture nominee "The Help" was viewed by many in the black community as the embrace of a stereotype (another story of racial injustice starring a white person). Last week, a USC Annenberg study supplied a reminder of Hollywood realities. The school analyzed the 500 top-grossing films at the U.S. box office in recent years. Last year, African-Americans represented 10.8 percent of all speaking characters. (Hispanics at 4.2 percent and Asians with 5 percent fared even worse.) Between 2007 and 2012, the 565 directors of the top 500 films included only 33 black filmmakers, and just two of them black women. The imbalance also affects the kind of roles black actors receive. Black males are notably less likely to play romantic partners or parents, according to the study. Most of this year's wave of films relied not on Hollywood studios for distribution, but independent distributors, and had to hunt hard for financing. Lee Daniels and the late producer Laura Ziskin sought out wealthy African-Americans to fund "The Butler." "It's politically incorrect ... to scream racism in Hollywood, in America," says Daniels. "It's time to now not do that. We've got to call it as we see it."
Change, of course, can come in spurts, and the discussion generated by the films this year has only just started. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott recently claimed the movies are provoking a national conversation on race that politicians have failed to generate. New York magazine's Frank Rich lamented that even a film such as "12 Years a Slave" can only accomplish so much outside of the movie theater. "Dialogue is occurring," says Whitaker, who also helped produce "Fruitvale Station" and stars in "Black Nativity."
''People are taking their points of view about how they see their environment, their world. All these films are engaging in that dialogue." But Whitaker emphasized there's a long way to go, still: "People act like it's a history as opposed to recognizing it as a movement," he says. One could look at these movies as chronological snapshots of that movement: from the 19th century Louisiana plantation of "12 Years a Slave" to the Civil Rights upheaval of 20th century Washington in "The Butler," and finally to the contemporary prejudices of "Fruitvale Station." "They're great stories which happen to tell the stories of black people," says Ejiofor. "I kind of have a suspicion that that's the way it should be."
[Associated
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