David Oyelowo and Ava DuVernay. Atsushi Nishijima/Paramount Pictures
Obscuring the current Oscar race are trumped-up political controversies regarding Selma and American Sniper, proving that censorship and political correctness cut both ways.
First detractors claimed that Selma did not portray President Lyndon Baines Johnson correctly, neglecting his role in the passage of civil rights legislation. In a Washington Post op-ed, former Johnson aide Joseph Califano went so far as to accuse Selma director Ava DuVernay of “taking dramatic, trumped-up license” by showing Johnson “at odds with Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Through poor writing, Califano implied that Johnson was responsible for the march in Selma, and bizarrely insisted that the “movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.”
Op-ed writers around the country jumped on the bandwagon, extolling Johnson’s real commitment to civil rights while tarring DuVernay with willful ignorance or disrespect for history. Even when a writer essentially agreed with all her points, as Julian Zelizer did on the CNN site, his conclusion is that DuVernay “misrepresented” Johnson.
This past weekend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called DuVernay’s work “egregious,” and DuVernay herself a liar: “Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.”
DuVernay is being attacked because Johnson apologists can’t bear the thought of someone—anyone, especially a young black woman—questioning the only truly decent thing left of his legacy as president.
DuVernay depicts Johnson in harsh but clear-eyed terms—as a politician with an agenda he is protecting, as a President who wants to time his battles with legislative bodies, as something of an opportunist and manipulator. The movie I saw did not accuse Johnson of being a racist, or of trying to thwart black objectives, but of wanting to delay the momentum of civil rights progress to suit his own needs. Which he unquestionably did.
To Califano and his Johnson loyalists, this simply will not do. Rule out this movie!
To Dowd and other witch hunters, DuVernay distorted the truth about race when she had “an even higher responsibility to be accurate.” How was the truth distorted? Dowd recounts a highly suspicious story told by Jack Valenti to historian Michael Beschloss about how Johnson told him he wanted to pass the Voting Rights Act the day JFK was assassinated.
Dowd also suggests that in Selma, Johnson “let J. Edgar Hoover send a sex tape of her husband to Mrs. King.” Turns out Robert F. Kennedy actually sent Coretta Scott King the tape. But in the movie I saw, DuVernay never says Johnson sent the tapes, she shows the President discussing the wiretaps with J. Edgar Hoover and approving their use. Which he must have done in one form or another for RFK to act the way he did.
DuVernay’s account of the incidents surrounding the Selma march may not show Johnson in the best light, but they also do not accuse him of wrongdoing. I think DuVernay has found a version of the events that is logical, persuasive, and not wholly dismissive of Johnson’s input.
Credit Califano with a brilliant sense of timing, appealing to Academy members right when they were considering their ballots. And since, as the Los Angeles Times reported, Oscar voters [are] 94% white, 77% male and only 14% under the age of 50, they are not about to award anyone they might consider “uppity.”
A stunt performance in a movie that whitewashes the facts of its story? Right up the Academy’s alley, which is why Eddie Redmayne is a Best Actor frontrunner for The Theory of Everything, another example of Great Britain’s idea of the “theater of quality.” (I could say the same thing about Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, a movie with its own long list of distortions.)
Meanwhile, David Oyelowo is ignored despite his fiery, challenging performance as King. David Carr at the New York Times doesn’t think Oyelowo was snubbed per se, suggesting he didn’t get enough votes because Paramount was backing Interstellar and because Selma screeners “came late and somewhat sporadically.”
Carr defended Selma more than other Times writers like Frank Bruni and noted film historian Ross Douthat (yes, that Ross Douthat). But Carr has his own blind side. In the same article he calls American Sniper “a portrait of American greatness,” a distortion as egregious as Dowd’s column.
Which I will at greater length discuss in my next posting.
