AFOS Blog Rewind: Selma

After directing Selma, the 2014 movie that won a Best Original Song Oscar for the Common/John Legend track "Glory," Ava DuVernay has, in addition to being the first filmmaker to ever inspire a Barbie doll based on her likeness, racked up an intriguing bunch of directorial credits. She directed the 2016 Netflix documentary film The 13th and the first two episodes of the OWN drama Queen Sugar (a show she also wrote for during its first season), and she signed up to direct the forthcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic sci-fi novel I remember reading as homework in grade school (here's how long ago it was when I read Wrinkle: the cover artwork on my copy was the version that had the disembodied head of a Darkseid lookalike encased in a crystal ball). The following is a repost of a February 5, 2015 discussion of DuVernay's breakout film in the mainstream. Selma, a historical film about civil rights activism, will continue being timely, especially in a year that will inevitably see an increase in activism against both America's next president (God, those last three words sound like the title of the world's shittiest reality show, which is fitting because reality TV-loving idiots are among the ones who put him and the likes of Omarosa in office) and his inflammatory rhetoric.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Show said to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).

Fuck the #WhiteOscars: A mash-up of Jill St. John's 1966 Oscar striptease and AlunaGeorge is far more satisfying in its two little minutes than the Oscars will ever be

Somebody who goes by "LOSANGELENA" has combined two of my favorite things: the atrocious, unintentionally funny and long-out-of-print 1966 showbiz melodrama The Oscar and the British R&B duo AlunaGeorge's 2014 joint "Supernatural." Actually, The Oscar isn't exactly one of my favorite things. I wouldn't say I like The Oscar. What I do like is chuckling over almost every inept element of this Harlan Ellison-scripted, MST3K-worthy movie, from Stephen Boyd's overacting and his weird Hayden Christensen-esque voice (while he shrilly plays the part of Frankie Fane, an ambitious Hollywood asshole who ends up becoming an Oscar contender) to the equally shrill Tony Bennett's visible nervousness in his first acting role.

It's no wonder that the singer of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Rags to Riches" never acted again, aside from his cameos during The Simpsons, Muppets Most Wanted and Alec Baldwin's endlessly quotable "Tony Bennett Show" sketch on SNL. The only stars in The Oscar who give what could be considered non-cringeworthy and not-so-clichéd performances are a non-comedic Milton Berle as an oddly principled talent agent and an equally non-comedic Jack Soo as an Asian houseboy who--and this is kind of remarkable because this is a movie from the not-exactly-racially-enlightened '60s--doesn't have an accent. It's funny how the two stand-up comics in the Oscar cast--two guys who weren't known for possessing dramatic chops when they were alive--give the least cringeworthy and most naturalistic performances in the whole movie.

(Photo source: Catfan's Feline Fatale Follies)

The best way to approach this kind of soapy "I don't give a shit who I bang or who I ruin to climb my way to the top" material is to do it as a comedy. That's why I love Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which is so razor-sharp in its humor that it's made it difficult to take any musician biopic seriously anymore. Walk Hard takes musician biopic clichés like any scene where a white musician as a kid appropriates black musicians' sounds, basically says to the audience, "Hasn't this always looked ridiculous and stupid to you?," and then proceeds to make those clichés look even more ridiculous and stupid.

Instead, The Oscar plays it completely dead serious when it should be, oh, I don't know, more like Soapdish or the forgotten WB single-camera sitcom Grosse Pointe, which was basically Soapdish for the 90210/Dawson's Creek crowd--or better yet, more like John Waters. In fact, in an alternate universe far more entertaining than our own, The Oscar was probably directed by John Waters instead of being under the hacky, mid-'60s network TV-ish direction of D.O.A. co-writer Russell Rouse, with Divine in the role of a feminized Frankie Fane. And then in another alternate universe even more entertaining than that one, The Oscar was directed by Russ Meyer. Either of those guys would have transformed The Oscar into a comedic masterpiece.

This 1966 atrocity--which would have swept the Razzies had the Razzies existed in the '60s--is not on DVD. The only place where viewers can catch The Oscar is TCM, which shows a terrible-looking print. That's where I saw The Oscar and realized that as a dramatic actor, Tony Bennett is a decent watercolor painter. The movie features a striptease by future Bond girl Jill St. John that I assume was racy for its pre-Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/Blow-Up time, and that's the scene from The Oscar that "LOSANGELENA" perfectly mashed up with singer Aluna Francis and producer George Reid's pulsating "Supernatural," along with footage from some late '60s Italian sexploitation flick I'm not familiar with.



I get more enjoyment out of the mash-up of The Oscar and AlunaGeorge than I ever would out of the tedious Oscar telecast--which I haven't watched in eons--and its annual array of frustrating snubs and overall out-of-touchness. Instead of dozing off during the 20,528th Chuck Workman montage of the night or fuming over "Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there’s no art to it" (I'd like to know what drugs that Academy member was on) and the absences of Selma star David Oyelowo and his director Ava DuVernay in the Oscar categories (plus the absences of a few other actors of color who delivered exceptional performances that went unrecognized), I'll be spending time with The Walking Dead, where an Asian American guy gets to be a hero who gets the girl for a change and actors of color like Steven Yeun and Danai Gurira receive far juicier material than the hackneyed kind the Academy would rather pay attention to when one or two actors of color actually do enter their often fucked-up radar.

Throwback Thursday: Selma

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Show said to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).

Wilmore added that awards aren't even as important as the fact that a black female producer, Shonda Rhimes, the Scandal creator/showrunner and How to Get Away with Murder producer (but not HTGAWM's creator, an important distinction that an actual writer from the supposedly observant New York Times failed to even notice), basically now has a night of network TV programming all to herself, something unprecedented in network TV history. He hasn't let the snubs bother him because he's not surprised by them ("It's hard to get me outraged over stuff that happens all the time").

Ava DuVernay

To recap those snubs, DuVernay didn't receive a Best Director nomination even though her film landed a Best Picture nod. She could have been the first black woman nominated for Best Director. The Academy also overlooked Selma star David Oyelowo's breakout performance--in America, that is, because elsewhere, particularly in the U.K., the British Nigerian actor is a familiar face to TV viewers over there--as Martin Luther King, a rare great turn by a British actor where he's not mangling an American accent for once. I'll always love Amy Poehler for making fun of British actors' often forced-sounding attempts at American accents in her 2015 Golden Globes monologue with Tina Fey. Oyelowo (pronounced "oh-YELL-oh-woe") does it well in Selma. Daniel Craig does not. Idris Elba can do it. Lennie James cannot, unless it's a Southern accent like his current one on The Walking Dead. David Harewood can do it. Philip Glenister cannot, and it's why parts of ITV's Demons were an unintentional laugh riot. Marianne Jean-Baptiste can do it. Saffron Burrows was so terrible at it that Boston Legal had to retcon her lawyer character and change her to a British ex-brothel madam pretending to be American. Damian Lewis can do it. Oyelowo's Selma co-star Tom Wilkinson, who portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, often cannot, but he's such a great actor that his dodgy and cartoonish Mafioso accent in Batman Begins fails to ruin his imposingness during the 2005 blockbuster's best scene, his "this is a world you'll never understand" monologue.

Another frustrating but not as frequently discussed Selma Oscar snub is the lack of a nomination for another black member of Selma's crew, cinematographer Bradford Young. He did excellent work lighting King's church speeches, the harrowing "Bloody Sunday" sequence and a key jail cell scene where a perturbed King asks fellow activist Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) whether being able to sit at the same lunch counter with white people is worth it when the system continually keeps the marginalized from being able to afford to eat there.

Something else has kept me from being enraged about the Selma snubs: the simple fact that I don't give a shit about the Oscars, an inane popularity contest that's frequently been on the wrong side of film history. When Do the Right Thing was the best American film released in 1989, what did the Academy give the Best Picture trophy to? The "safer choice" of the astoundingly tone-deaf and stereotypical Driving Miss Daisy. And of those two 1989 films about race relations, which one continues to be discussed in think pieces or oral history pieces and dissected in film school courses? Definitely not "Yes, Miss Daisy." And don't get me worked up over Dances with Wolves winning Best Picture over GoodFellas the following year. Sure, we should all be grateful for how Dances with Wolves gave a breakthrough role to the great Native Canadian actor Graham Greene and a bunch of substantial roles to Indian actors, but it's also a frustrating white savior movie, something Selma is not.

It's not going to matter to me which film will win Best Picture on February 22 because Selma has accomplished something greater than that trophy, and that's simply being a rare feature film about the modern civil rights movement that's told from the point of view of the oppressed for a change. DuVernay has defied the common foolishness of inserting a white savior character into a story about the plight of people of color, whether that story is Cry Freedom or Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, to make it more "palatable" to white audiences. In fact, the original version of Selma's screenplay by screenwriter Paul Webb, who retained sole credit for the screenplay despite DuVernay's many changes to it, positioned President Johnson as the white savior figure and placed more emphasis on the interactions between King and LBJ. But when DuVernay climbed on board the project (Lee Daniels was originally supposed to direct Selma, but he chose to direct The Butler instead), she wisely refocused the screenplay on King and his colleagues, including black women in the movement like King's wife Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey, whom Oyelowo brought onto the project) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson from Dear White People).

As an Asian American viewer, the four words I immediately think of whenever I encounter "white savior genre" are Come See the Paradise. That's the 1990 Oscar-bait flick that's better remembered these days for spawning ubiquitous '90s trailer music than for its story of World War II Japanese American internment camp inmates told through the eyes of Dennis Quaid as Tamlyn Tomita's white husband (Come See the Paradise also happened to be Parker's follow-up to Mississippi Burning; like Jerry Seinfeld used to say in that ear-piercing whine of his, what is the deal with this Parker guy?). Almost every white savior genre movie goes like this:

Hi.

I'm white.

My best friend is not white.

Some people are being mean to my best friend for being different.

That makes me very sad.

Here are 95 minutes about why I'm very sad.

Also, see all the things I will do to make the bad people be nice to my best friend.

The genre is stupid, infantile, offensive and always worthy of ridicule. As far back as 1990, In Living Color was skewering anti-apartheid white savior movies with a great fake trailer for a tearjerker about the suffering of a wealthy white South African lady who loses her black housekeeper to apartheid and cries and pleads by letter for her return and then cries again. Even Avatar, the sci-fi action flick where Antony Starr Chris Hemsworth Jai Courtney Sam Worthington becomes enlightened by a race of mistreated aliens, suffers from white savior syndrome. Selma basically says "fuck off" to that type of film, a genre that's rarely questioned or criticized by white Hollywood, and that's probably a reason why neither the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy nor the LBJ defenders who aren't former LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers really care for Selma.

The LBJ defenders who were more extreme in their beef with Selma than Moyers (he appreciates the film despite his problems with how it portrays his former boss) proceeded to mastermind a smear campaign that succeeded in ruining the film's Oscar chances. Their accusations that Selma distorts LBJ into a villain are silly. The film humanizes him by showing his flawed ways of thinking and how he ultimately changed his mind about hesitating over voting rights legislation, just like how it takes King, a figure who's either been sanitized, reduced to a catchphrase ("I have a dream") or exploited by both Madison Avenue and right-wing TV hosts whose ideologies he would have opposed, and explores his doubts and insecurities as a leader (like in the jail cell scene) and depicts his generational conflict with younger activists. King's infidelity in his marriage is even addressed, something the last major film about King, director Clark Johnson's equally effective 2001 HBO film Boycott, didn't do (Boycott also happened to feature Ejogo in the same role of Coretta, who was younger and less jaded about both her marriage and activism in general in Johnson's film because it took place in 1955).

Selma rarely turns into the kind of stiff and formulaic Oscar-bait The Boondocks made fun of nine years ago when it actually predicted Cuba Gooding Jr.'s appearance in an MLK movie--in Selma, Gooding has a cameo as an attorney--and briefly mocked how often Hollywood mishandles historical figures like King. Part of Selma's verisimilitude is due to the way DuVernay follows various figures in King's cause and not just King himself to show how much the cause became bigger than him.

The DuVernay film's ensemble feel on a low budget is reminiscent of A Night to Remember, the documentary-like, British-made 1958 Titanic movie that's far better than the James Cameron version. Selma glimpses the movement's impact on the likes of young protester Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) and his family; John Lewis (Stephan James, whose resemblance to Lewis is uncanny), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member who later became both a Congressman and a historical graphic novel author; and even some of the white activists or ministers who joined King's marches.

DuVernay avoided creating composite characters--the usual practice of an Oscar-bait biopic--and wanted to include as many different real-life figures as possible. There is one moment though, when Selma sets itself up for the kind of parody The Boondocks used to often excel at in its first three seasons: the bizarre sight of Oprah punching a cop, although Annie Lee Cooper actually did punch that cop. I imagine this is where Oprah intervened and said, "I'm the producer. I wanna be the one to play Annie and punch a cop." While it's a rousing scene taken from history, it's also the one distracting moment in the film that borders on "John Wayne crashing Christ's crucifixion" campiness.

Otherwise, like Boycott or any other historical drama that doesn't feel like a stiff and formulaic biopic, Selma takes subjects like King's struggles with voting rights legislation and the scourge of police brutality and finds ways to make them resonate in a current climate of ignorance towards voting rights and outrage over police brutality. One of those ways is Common and John Legend's Golden Globe-winning end title theme "Glory." In that track, Common, who portrays James Bevel in the film, links the activism in Selma and Montgomery to the activism in Ferguson and echoes the film's communal focus when he raps, "No one can win the war individually" ("Glory" is also a unique track in hip-hop: like The Physics' "These Moments" in 2011 and Jay Electronica's "Better in Tune with the Infinite" last year, almost all of "Glory" contains no percussion, perhaps to mirror the film's subject of non-violent activism). DuVernay herself best explained Selma's contemporary-minded and non-stodgy approach to historical drama when she said, "Oh gosh, I'm completely allergic to historical dramas. Particularly those around the civil-rights movement. It's not my favorite thing to watch. So often they feel like medicine... I really wanted it to be nuanced and feel urgent, and to have some life to it."

Oscar trophies are nothing when compared to a simple accomplishment like that.

"Glory," the Oscar-nominated Selma end title theme, can be heard during "Color Box" (weekdays at 10am Pacific) and "New Cue Revue" (Wednesdays and Fridays at noon Pacific) on AFOS.

"The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS is being renamed "Color Box"

The annual Oscar luncheon attended by all the acting nominees will be so white this year the menu will experience an 80 percent increase in mayonnaise. (Photo source: YOMYOMF)

The AFOS weekday morning block name "The Whitest Block Ever" is supposed to be a joke. The block is far from the whitest thing ever. It consists of original themes and score cues from films and TV shows directed by Asian American filmmakers and other directors of color. Jokey name aside, the two-hour 10am block is a way to celebrate these directors' efforts to break into and succeed (or in the case of Asian American YouTube content creators like Wong Fu Productions, to persevere on their own) in a largely white--and often discriminatory--industry that sadly doesn't reflect how most of the rest of America is headed towards becoming a more diverse place.

Bear McCreary's "Courthouse Brawl" and "Stop Running" from Human Target are part of the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist because African American director Kevin Hooks directed the Human Target episode that contains those cues, and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme is in there because Debbie Allen directed the Fresh Prince pilot. Black, Latino and Asian directors aren't the only directors who are celebrated in "The Whitest Block Ever." BC Smith and ULALI's "Forgive Our Fathers Suite" from Native American director Chris Eyre's 1998 work Smoke Signals is part of the playlist, so Native American directors are celebrated as well.

David Oyelowo and his Selma director Ava DuVernay

But when no actors of color were nominated for this year's Oscars--an overly long-winded award show I stopped caring about years ago because of how frustrating its annual snubs are--and it resulted in the 2015 Oscar acting categories literally being the whitest block ever, the name "The Whitest Block Ever" isn't so amusing anymore. In fact, it's become rather depressing. David Oyelowo's quietly powerful performance as Dr. Martin Luther King during his non-oratorial moments in Selma was overlooked by the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy, as was director Ava DuVernay's work on that riveting historical drama, which received from the Academy only Best Picture and Best Original Song nominations. Had DuVernay been nominated for Best Director, she would have been the first black female director to be nominated in that category. I like what Selma co-star Wendell Pierce said about moviegoers' frustrations with the snubs: "The people's reaction speaks for itself. To me, it's what the reaction would have been had Marlon Brando not been nominated for Godfather, if Rod Steiger had not been nominated for The Pawnbroker, if De Niro hadn't been nominated for Taxi Driver. That's what you felt this morning when David Oyelowo was not nominated for an Oscar."

Also, the time for a name change for "The Whitest Block Ever" has been long overdue. So because of those two reasons, I'm dumping the "Whitest Block Ever" name and renaming the 10am block. "Color Box" begins life under its new name with a new addition to the playlist. That addition is the song from the film that's the very thing on the minds of those who have trended #OscarsSoWhite, a tune that won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song last Sunday and is now up for an Oscar: "Glory," the anthemic Selma end title theme that ties the activism in Selma and Montgomery together with the activism in Ferguson and reteamed Selma cast member Common with John Legend, his guest vocalist from one of my favorite Common tracks, "They Say."





You can call it what you want to: "Oh, the Selma snubs were because of the negative publicity created by the smear campaign by LBJ's camp about Selma's portrayal of LBJ" or "Oh, it's because Paramount bungled Selma's Oscar campaign and didn't time it so well." But the Selma snubs are simply industry ignorance about anyone who's neither white nor male. The snubs are one of several ways that white Hollywood basically sends a message that writers and directors of color and their stories--especially stories that are told from the points of view of people of color for a change and aren't marred by the presence of a white savior character to misguidedly make the stories more palatable to white audiences--matter little to them.

It's the same kind of industry ignorance that causes a so-called reporter at the Television Critics Association winter press tour to ask both Eddie Huang--the celebrity chef whose book about growing up in a Taiwanese family, Fresh Off the Boat, has been adapted into an eagerly anticipated and promising-looking ABC sitcom where he provides voiceovers as the off-screen narrator--and the Fresh Off the Boat cast the following question: "I love the Asian culture. And I was just talking about the chopsticks, and I just love all that. Will I get to see that? Or will it be more Americanized?" I would have loved for Huang, who proved twice that he's not one for mincing his words, first in a Vulture tell-all piece about his frustrations with ABC's sitcom version of his own childhood and then again later on in that same TCA panel, to have replied with "That's a stupid fucking question" or--had that person in the audience not been female--"You love chopsticks, right? How about you go shove one up your ass? You'd love that, right, B?"

So let's set aside those two depressing headlines from last week for now and look at where the new AFOS block name "Color Box" comes from. I named "Beat Box," the 7am AFOS block, after an Art of Noise track. That's why it's spelled "Beat Box," not "Beatbox." The "Beat Box" name continues an AFOS block name template that began with "Rock Box," a now-defunct AFOS block that consisted of existing songs that were used in movies by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright and shows ranging from The Wire to The Boondocks. "Beat Box" has double meaning: there's the connection to the Art of Noise instrumental and then there's the fact that the block is literally a box of beats on the Live365 Broadcast Scheduler grid. "Color Box," another continuation of the station's "Blablabla Box" name template, also has double meaning: it refers to both the directors of color whose works are being represented from 10am to noon on AFOS and the color boxes in Photoshop and Windows XP, which contain as much diversity as the "Color Box" playlist.

What else is in the future for "Color Box"? I'm adding a musical number from The Book of Life, Mexican animator Jorge R. Gutierrez's recent 3D-animated feature film about Día de los Muertos, to "Color Box" rotation later this month. And if Justin Lin--who's represented on the "Color Box" playlist by Semiautomatic's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, Brian Tyler's score cues from Finishing the Game, Ludwig Göransson's score cues from the Lin-directed Community episode "Modern Warfare" and a few themes from Fast Five and Furious 6--doesn't end up exiting the 2016 Star Trek threequel that Bad Robot beamed him up to direct after Roberto Orci was kicked out of the captain's chair, maybe some Star Trek score cues will be added to "Color Box" some time in the future. What would be especially cool is having those cues sit beside the Fresh Prince theme, Eric B. & Rakim's Juice theme and Dre and Snoop's Deep Cover theme.

Sure, I love it whenever a person of color like Lin directs Star Trek (before the hiring of Lin, Next Generation regular LeVar Burton and Voyager regular Roxann Dawson both got their starts as TV directors helming episodes of their respective shows). But after the empty-headed Star Trek Into Darkness, a misfire that proved how ill-suited the Bad Robot version of Star Trek is in handling terrorism and war, two subjects Deep Space Nine previously tackled with much more nuance, Star Trek needs to be cerebral again. Bad Robot's own show Fringe, which had its protagonists constantly thinking their way through the sci-fi predicament of the week, was closer to the cerebral and exploratory spirit of the '60s Trek and its spinoff shows than Bad Robot's Trek movies themselves have been. I like Lin as both a director and an Asian American creative mind who's both conscious of and candid about industry racism, but his signature movies have been a high-school gangster melodrama with an action-flick aesthetic (Better Luck Tomorrow, still my favorite movie of his) and four action flicks that were sometimes flavored with gangster-melodrama elements (the Fast and the Furious sequels). The latter isn't exactly the cerebral direction I've been wanting Trek to return to. I'd be more thrilled about Hannibal showrunner and former Voyager writer Bryan Fuller--who always wanted to cast Angela Bassett as a starship captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, which I'd watch in a heartbeat--getting the chance to helm a new Trek project for TV, the medium where Trek works best. But we shall see what happens with this Trek threequel. At least Lin--who would be reunited with his Better Luck Tomorrow cast member John Cho--in the director's chair is far better than allowing Orci the crazy 9/11 truther to direct. I'm glad Paramount basically said, "Beam us up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life on Orci's planet."