During the course of my life, I have boycotted the Academy Awards for several reasons. When The Color Purple was nominated for all of those awards and did not win one. When Denzel didn’t win for Malcolm X. Shoot, I didn’t watch it at all during the 70s because they were always messing up with the best actress category, and my folks didn’t play that. But now, after the award for best song went to It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp??? And that was just the second “Oh hell no” moment of the evening.
The first one was when George “He knows he NEVER should have taken the Batman role” Clooney said that the Academy and Hollywood were ahead of mainstream America. Yeah, they made AIDS a big issue… I’ll give him credit for that, but when he fixed his mouth to say that they presented Hattie McDaniel with an award when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters… I was mad as what. I mean, THEY didn’t give Hattie McDaniel anything that her performance did not DEMAND, okay? She was the first black person to admitted as a guest and not a servant at the academy awards. Was she even allowed to walk through the front door? Because she wasn’t allowed to even appear on the printed program at the premiere of Gone With the Wind because HOLLYWOOD in all of its forward thinking made the greatest efforts possible to appeal to the backwards and injust mentality of white Atlanta moviegoers. Where was the out of the box thinking, then? Then there’s The Color Purple. Where was the progress then? And where was it when Denzel “became” Malcolm X? Shoot, his performance in Philadelphia was better than Training Day, where he was awarded for playing a womanizing crooked cop.
And you mean to tell me that Halle Berry’s performance in Monster’s Ball topped Diana in Lady Sings the Blues, Diahann in Claudine, shoot, Whoopi in The Color Purple, Cicely Tyson in anything? Whatever. The academy and Hollywood in general are not as free thinking and sensitive as they like to think that they are.
But back to It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp. Do you know how far this sets black music back? Shoot, do you know how far this sets black people back? Hundreds of millions of people around the world saw us portraying OURSELVES as pimps and whores. We don’t need help in that department. And let me state for the record, it isn’t hard AT ALL to be a pimp! Maybe it’s hard to book the right hair dresser, but it is not hard to take money from women who you have brainwashed to sell themselves and who you constantly beat to keep in line. That’s not hard at all. It’s hard out there to make an honest living and be a real man, but it’s not hard at all to be a pimp.
Like I said before, back to the boycott.
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