Only movies with subservient black characters get Oscar noms – David Oyelowo

“No, look, historically – this is truly my feeling; I felt this before the situation we’re talking about and I feel it now – generally speaking, we, as black people, have been celebrated more for when we are subservient, when we are not being leaders or kings or being at the center of our own […]

“No, look, historically – this is truly my feeling; I felt this before the situation we’re talking about and I feel it now – generally speaking, we, as black people, have been celebrated more for when we are subservient, when we are not being leaders or kings or being at the center of our own narrative,” Oyelowo, 38, said during a Q&A at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Sunday, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“We have been slaves, we have been domestic servants, we have been criminals, we have been all of those things,” he continued. “But we have been leaders, we have been kings, we have been those who changed the world.”
Martin Luther King Jr. certainly changed the world, but, regardless, it took Hollywood fifty years to make a movie about him, Oyelowo argued. “Those films are so hard to get made. People have often said to me, ‘Why has it taken so long?’ I mean, [King] was assassinated almost 50 years ago. There has been no film where Dr. King has been the center of his own narrative until now,” he said. “That’s because up until ‘12 Years a Slave’ and ‘The Butler’ did so well, both critically and at the box office, films like this were told through the eyes of white protagonists because there is a fear of white guilt.”
“So you have a very nice white person who holds black people’s hands through their own narrative,” Oyelowo explained. “We don’t want to see that pain again, so you don’t even go into what that pain was in an authentic way. Both of those things are patronizing to the audience. You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.”
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