[Steeltrap]

I picked this up from the NPHC listside. It is originally from the seeingblack (sp?) site. The commentator seems a bit 'cised:

> I Take No Pride In Berry's Oscar Nomination
> By Miles Willis
>
> As an African-American man, I find nothing to be proud of in actress Halle Berry's recent Academy Award nomination. I haven't even seen the film, so it's not that I don't think her performance deserves to be so recognized. Nor is the significance of her nomination, and its potential for opening up more doors and attitudes for black actresses, lost upon me.
I simply find the premise of "Monster's Ball", in which a character played by one of our most prized beauties, falls in love with a racist white prison guard, played by an actor named Billy Bob no less, who led her late husband to his execution, deliberately insulting. With its profanely incongruous and utterly implausible scenario, the plot of this film is a sneering, in-your-face taunt to all black men.
Imagine the seething indignation that a Jewish man might feel while watching a story in which the widow of a Nazi concentration camp victim has an intimate relationship with the SS officer that shoved her husband into one of those ovens at Auschwitz!
And for Ms. Berry, "Monster's Ball" is unfortunately just the latest screening, at least since 1992's "Boomerang", in which we must endure seeing her in the throes of passion with white men. Her character boldly exposed her breasts to a white man in the movie "Swordfish", another `got down' with an old white senator
in "Bullworth", and had two white men, husband and lover/co-conspirator, in playing "The Rich Man's Wife".
Of course portraying Dorothy Dandridge required Berry's character, as Dandridge once described her own romantic/marital relationships, to 'throw (herself) at white men.' It seems that that's all Hollywood will throw at Ms. Berry. I don't think
that it's mere coincidence.
The motivation behind this phenomenon is clearly rooted in the legacy of slavery. Many plantation owners were notorious sexual predators who forced themselves upon slave women and girls of their choice at their leisure, and their men were powerless to stop it. On today's plantation, Hollywood confirms that `old times there (truly) are not forgotten' as they recreate those longed-for days of unrestricted dalliances with their chattel by casting the best looking black actresses with white actors.
At the same time they marginalize black men, both in front of
and behind the camera, into cinematic inferiority and insignificance, denying them access to the opportunity to tell passionate tales of black people in love.
Except for the all-black film adaptations of "Carmen" and "Porgy and Bess", the latter having been referred to by some black sctors as a `coon show', Dandridge, always near the top of any list of all-time most beautiful African-American women, never had an on-screen black lover, or an off-screen one for that matter, since only white men could advance her career. Lena Horne never played opposite white actors, but felt compelled to marry a white man just so that she could more fully enjoy the accoutrements of her show business celebrity.
Fast forward to 1992 with Whitney Houston who starred in the movie, "The Bodyguard". As one of the most successful pop singers in history, with cover-girl looks and proven cross-over appeal, she could have made a romantic drama with Denzel, Wesley, Morris, etc that would surely have been a box office smash.
Instead, Hollywood produced a big budget heavily promoted blockbuster in which Whitney's character takes a white man as her protector and lover. I felt snubbed and disrespected, having
to just stand by and let `Massa' take my woman for himself, just like before.
Now let's flip the scenario as we consider the country music vocalist Leann Rimes. She is a beautiful, successful recording artist who surely will act(?) in movies someday. But can you imagine her first role being analogous to Whitney's, that of a singer with a black bodyguard/lover? It's inconceivable! Why? I think its because the media has so successfully demonized black men that the movie industry would run the risk of offending white male viewers with such a pairing. But they obviously have no such concerns about our sensibilities.
Angela Bassett, a critically acclaimed and enchantingly beautiful actress, was Robert De Niro's character's girlfriend in a recent movie ("The Score"). Thandie Newton's character in the second "Mission Impossible" movie was shared between two white characters. Even the original super-sister Pam Grier
had a white lover in "Foxy Brown".
The main purpose of the movie industry is to create fantasy, and it's pretty obvious whose fantasies Hollywood [is] trying to satisfy. I want to go to big-budget, action-packed, exciting, romantic, heavily-promoted and critically acclaimed movies and
see beautiful black women with guys who look (at least somewhat) like me, so that I can fantasize about them being with me, just like the white men do when they go see movies with beautiful white women like Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts. Obviously Hollywood could care less about what black men would like to see.
The sex scene in "Monsters Ball' is so graphic that according to Berry herself, her husband walked out of the theater. I feel you there, Eric.
I don't even want to see it. And we must remember that when the movie industry finds that a particular type of movie is successful, it makes a whole bunch more just like it. So you can bet that if Halle wins an Oscar for "Monster's Ball", and maybe even just because of the acclaim her portrayal has generated, we can expect to see more movies with fine black women gettin' down with mangy, white redneck 'billybobs' that
> de-humanize and execute their black men; after all, vicious racists need love too. I find that prospect truly monstrous.