UnNews:Black actors launch plan for next year’s Oscars
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Just a week after the Oscars, the Black American Actors Delegation (BAAD) has announced its plans to ensure as many awards are won by black performers next year as possible.
“Before this year’s ceremony, Lupita Nyong'o said that the Oscars were ‘a diverse reflection of the best of what our art has to offer today'," said BAAD spokesman Nathaniel Brigadoon.
“First we thought: this is simply not true. The Oscars do not represent universal cinema, they reflect American cinema.
"Then we thought: they don’t even reflect American cinema, they represent Hollywood cinema.
"Finally, we realized: they don’t even reflect Hollywood cinema. They reflect big-budget Hollywood dramas. That’s it. So we are gonna big-budget-drama the shit out of y'all."
BAAD has since released details of a number of forthcoming productions, which Brigadoon explained:
- “Slave films are our go-to option, but 12 Years a Slave was a recent winner, so we have moved on a generation. Hence, we introduce Freeman, a harrowing drama about a slave becoming one of the first free African-Americans, and his ensuing struggles with institutionalization, and the foraging of a new path. Starring Denzel Washington.”
- “The other thing they eat up at the Oscars are biopics. So, we are making A Dream, a Martin Luther King biopic starring Idris Elba, Pryor Offenses, a harrowing portrayal of Richard Pryor’s life starring Jamie Foxx, and we have an idea for a Michael Jackson picture, as soon as we find a black actor who is white enough to play him.”
- “Analyzing recent winners, we found some kind of change of body shape or convincing accent can really push someone’s claim for an Academy Award. So, Don Cheadle is going to gain 150lbs to play a compulsive eater in the harrowing Buffalo Wing, and Samuel L. Jackson is doing a Jamaican accent to play gangster Winston 'T-Bone' Marley in Kingston Town. It’s a shame Michael Clarke Duncan died, he could have done a great weight-loss role. Why do our greatest fat actors die young?”
- ”The other big winner is terminal illness. We are going to have an ensemble piece called Tropic of Cancer about two old friends - Danny Glover and Forest Whitaker - visiting the dying Laurence Fishburne as he opts to spend his last days on an island in the Florida Keys."
- ”Woman in Hollywood have a hard time, and for black women it can be even harder. Society doesn’t tend to care about them, unless they are at absolute rock bottom, as in the harrowing Precious. For that reason, WellFair, starring Queen Latifah, Whoopi Goldberg, and a thrillingly unmade-up Halle Berry, tells the harrowing story of three black American women who fight against the gang-culture in their neighborhood by introducing gospel music to high school kids.”
- ”Finally, the Oscars love it when an actor plays against type. For perhaps the first time, we are going to see Will Smith play a hard-to-like but driven, passionate black man, as young militant Tyrell McMahon in I Was A Black Panther, brilliantly timed to coincide with the organization’s 51st anniversary. Morgan Freeman narrates as the older McMahon."
Not all the proposed ideas came to fruition, however. Brigadoon told UnNews: "We were working on these all week. By Friday, we were just done, creatively exhausted. One of my colleagues just said, 'Black Titanic', but we decided not to go for it."
