On Chadwick Boseman’s loss of the Best Actor Oscar at the 93rd Academy Awards
I love Anthony Hopkins, but not enough to forgive this wild injustice.
I’ll never hold it against Anthony Hopkins that he won a second Oscar. He’s a great man and a fine actor. But it was a wild, egregious, deliberate, cruel, outrageous insult that, at the ceremony that most recently occurred as of October 2021, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a second Oscar to a white man who had already won instead of to a Black man who had never been nominated before and who had been taken from us too young. The decision had such a profound negative impact on me that I’m still fuming over it almost a year later.
It can be argued that Hopkins’ performance was even more acclaimed than Chadwick Boseman’s was, but I don’t think that justifies this. I think that anti-racist principle holds that if a white man and a Black man are the two leading contenders for an acting award, and the Black man’s performance is roughly equally as good as the white man’s or better, you give the award to the Black man, especially if he dies young and you can use the occasion as an opportunity to honour his memory.
I can’t be more eloquent than that right now – I care about the Oscars a lot (probably too much), and I care about the cinema in general a lot, and I don’t have it in me to go on at length about this. I’m too broken by it. Not to mention that I know how silly it must feel to some to bring it up long after the controversy has exited the news cycle. I’ll simply say that it infuriates me with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns that, even in death, Black genius is not good enough.