A couple years ago, Steve Sailer made some Oscar observations:
Halle Berry’s gasping and sobbing Best Actress acceptance speech, which ran four times the recommended length of 45 seconds, may become as famous as Sally Field’s 1985 ‘You like me’ meltdown. Why are so many top actresses like that?The great detective novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, himself nominated for his 1944 script for ‘Double Indemnity,’ explained in ‘The Little Sister,’ his novel about a troubled actress: ‘If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard — well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid …’
If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard — well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid … I need to read more Chandler.
Anyway, Sailer pokes fun at Halle Berry’s “blackness”:
Berry’s speech included such memorably messianic lines as, “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” Strikingly, though, ABC flashed a quick shot of the former beauty queen’s mother, who happens to be very white.
Berry’s speech distracted from Denzel Washington’s much bigger breakthrough, playing the villain against white good guys:
Unfortunately, African-American actors have long been held back from getting these kind of juicy parts by what’s known as Ben Stein’s Law. The mordant law professor, economist, screenwriter and game show host made an in-depth study in 1979 that revealed in any Hollywood whodunit, the whitest, richest and most respectable character usually turns out to be the bad guy. In last summer’s “Rush Hour 2,” Chris Tucker updated Ben Stein’s Law with his “Law of Criminal Investigation: Always follow the rich white man.”