How the Oscars Demean The Profession of Acting
And how acting demeans us all…
I’ve spent more than half my life in the theater. I do not have to be convinced of its magic and value, and the magic and value of all artistic endeavors. But beyond any doubt, the first half of my career, such as it is, was far more pleasant and rewarding than the second half.
Here is why: I am a woman, and I am Asian-American. I sought to begin my career in theater in the United States, where I was born and grew up. The career path was writer, though I quickly realized playwriting was the medium I delighted in most. It’s a shame then, that 11% of all plays produced (pdf) in a year are by women. A surely smaller sliver of those are Asian-American women.
Further investigation reveals that if I were to become an actor, my odds get even worse. Unless I left the country.
In other industries, rarity and innovation can be king. Not so theater, who seems fiercely determined to play the some old “masters” a few times around the repertory and call it good. David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, David Ives and Aaron Sorkin. Those are the white, male (Jewish) faces of modern theater, and not a one is under the age of 50.
If there is a place I have less faith in than professional theatre, let us go to the mountaintop: the Academy Awards, airing this weekend. And while much ink has been spilled on the very likely-political omission of Selma’s director Ava DuVernay from Best Director category, I wish to talk about the actors.
The 87th Oscars aren’t nicknamed the White Oscars for nothing. There are no nominees of color in any of the four acting categories, a dubious achievement in non-diversity. Hold my phone and imagine the Grammys without a single person of color as a Best Album nominee in 2015. Hold your laughter when trying to apply that to the Tonys.
This year, and most years dictate that despite the apparent parity of nominations, we pay the most attention to the Best Actor category — and this appears to be the year of the biopic, but perhaps not in the way it could have been.
To wit, in their nominated roles, Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch are both playing real people —Redmayne, as Steven Hawking, and Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. I’ve heard great things. However both imitate history without the major characteristics of their subjects. Redmayne does not have ALS, as Hawking does, and Cumberbatch is heterosexual playing the gay Turing.
Despite Hawking’s vehement praise of Redmayne, which could have something to do with The Theory of Everything’s omission when Hawking left his devoted wife for his devoted nurse, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable lavishing such attention on a fake.
“Oh,” scoff some in their chairs, “This is a social-justice complaint. I wonder if anyone ever told this girl it’s called ‘acting’ because it is meant to be pretend.”
The previous looks like a fair statement, but it is in fact the rampant, unexamined hypocrisy of the acting business that makes “playing pretend” ring so false.
Why Redmayne when there is RJ Mitte? Yes, cerebral palsy and ALS are different diseases, but in the broad strokes why couldn’t Walter White’s kid step up to an indie movie’s plate? A film about disability cannot be bothered to accomodate one?
Why Cumberbatch when there is Pablo Pascal, Sean Hayes, Zachary Quinto, T.R. Knight, and countless others that might know something more specific and urgent to their lives about being in the closet like Turing?
Acting is much about the population wishing to do it than the incredibly few that succeed and climb to the platform to make nice to their agents. Acting includes the disabled, LGBTA, every race color and creed, and invariably this vast and wonderful diversity is cut down to:
Here I am quoting from the Twin Peaks reboot’s casting call
“HOT Caucasian girl — BRUNETTE OR REDHEADS ONLY to play waitress. Age 18–27. MUST have an amazing body. Busty, very period looking face.
It seems for Lynch, and Twin Peaks, and television itself that 25 years is not a lot of time. The same race that perhaps defines the Pacific Northwest continues to demand no flux, no change, and of course, no coloreds.
This is a video of actors of color, Hispanic, Black, Arab, Asian and others, discussing their careers. Two of my former classmates are represented in it, and as a dropout I can tell you the Actors Studio does not release slouches to the world or your auditions, without carefully catering to what is “needed.” For this reason there is an American Syntax voice training class, for this reason there are headshot workshops.
For many other reasons, despite all that work to smooth out the vocal expression of an other, to disguise their origins rather than proudly express them, even extra work covered in makeup to look like an elf dries up.
When what is needed is the best name to attach to a lie, rather than the most experience with a story, we get actors playing not just against type, but removing the real experiences from our screens. If you though the world worked as if it did in video games, blockbusters, even “serious dramas”, you’d think it was 80% populated with men. If you trusted Friends, or last summer’s Robocop, New York and Detroit’s crowded streets are packed with middle-class white people. Reality is distorted on the whim of a moneycounter worried about foreign sales.
In the Best Actress category there is another such faker or two: Reese Witherspoon playing a bereaved, real life heroin addict and Julianne Moore as a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
The article eludes me but a pundit has taken my side to the extreme, and said that an Alzheimer’s patient must necessary play one. While the justice of that may sound fantastic, many have pointed out that a film set and schedule can be a crushing and chaotic experience, so there I cannot follow. Not all struggles can be depicted, but there is an ethical obligation to try. And trying is not taking your white actor and taping his eyes, Wachowskis, ok?
This opinion — that laziness, xenophobia, and lack of risktaking in the type of actors is what ruins movies, not the performances of the actors in a vacuum — takes me far afield of The Actors Studio mores of Method Acting, in which traumatic experiences and “living” the character imply that anybody can be anybody.
And I say it’s not true. The type of authenticity demanded of Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or Jon Favreau demanded of himself in Chef, implies that actors are superhuman beings designated to drop into any role the human experience can create. It’s highly unpopular to suggest instead, that casting be predicated on first-hand knowledge of the text.
Watch on Sunday if you want: maybe ol’ Cumberbatch will be up there, descendent of slavers in Barbados, passionate advocate of the class system, speaking of an award he would have won on the back of a broken and alienated genius.
You tell me if that sounds like anything you’d want to take home.
