#dr vaughan cares about the child in her own way but is still a level of distance

[thedeafprophet]

Also I do think it's somewhat amusing of the LFs crew, it's my trans guy oc next to a group full of a women who gets Really Into being a parent

[selasphorus-rufus]

I’m listening to all of my housemates talking about how “funny” the reversal from tonight’s Oscars was and I’d just like to say one thing.

No. It wasn’t funny. 

I’ll go into a few more details, but please be warned for spoilers below the cut.

I get that it was an honest mistake and they handled it the best way that they could. But I’m going to take a moment and allow myself to steep in my rage-induced discourse for once. Please bear in mind that I’m not exactly a huge fan of movies and therefore haven’t seen any of these (though Hidden Figures has been pretty much the physical manifestation of all of my dreams regarding movies since I was 6 and got my first scientific encyclopedia and obsessively read about astronomy, but I digress).

Look at all of the movies that were nominated for Best Picture. There were 9 of them. Somehow, some way, four (4) of them feature POCs, primarily black actors/actresses (with Lion featuring an Indian main character along with a mostly white cast but for the sake of argument I’m going to focus on the main driving story element, which is based heavily in the history of the Indian character). That’s almost 50% of the movies nominated.

Please indulge me in a moment to give a few sentences about what each movie is about, courtesy of Wikipedia because I don’t quite care enough to do intense research. Maybe I’ll edit these synopses after watching the movies, but for now I think I can get my point across without all of that.

Fences is about a man who is trying to support his family while balancing a wayward estranged son who asks for money, a mistress, and a job as a garbage truck driver (the first black man to hold such a title in Pittsburgh, it’s noted). He struggles with interpersonal relations; his mistress dies in childbirth, he accidentally institutionalizes his mentally ill brother, and he is essentially kicked out of his own family, the one that he tries to hold together himself. It takes his death for his wife to accept him back into her life and for the entire family to reunite.

Hidden Figures details the struggle of three black women mathematicians who worked for NASA in the midst of the space race. The film focuses on Katherine Johnson, but also features Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, and identifies keen race divisions within the organization. Johnson has to work in an environment with no colored bathrooms, get jeered at for being both a woman and a black person in the same space, and even get all of her credit forced away from her after calculating how to guide the space capsule back to earth safely. The movie is about how Johnson, as well as Vaughan and Jackson, who I haven’t been able to wax as poetically about, must overcome both race and gender barriers in order to help NASA successfully launch and land Friendship 7.

Lion is about a man who, as a child, fell asleep on a train and was carried to a city far away from his native village, with no way of returning. He is adopted by an Australian couple who care for him for twenty years before he returns to India and decides to track his biological family by using the wonders of Google Earth. In this process, he begins to alienate himself from his adoptive family with the thoughts of the anxiety and worry he put his birth family through, but he soon manages to both come to terms with why he was adopted (his adoptive mother tells him that she felt too strongly that there were people who were in need and she could help via adoption) as well as find his birth family again and reunite with his biological mother.

Moonlight follows the life of a man named Chiron from childhood to adulthood. Chiron grew up with an “emotionally abusive mother” (Wikipedia’s words) and ends up becoming friendly with his mother’s crack dealer, Juan, seeming to take him as a father figure who looks out for him when his mother couldn’t. After learning that Juan has sold crack to his mother before, Chiron leaves. As Chiron grows up, he is trapped in the cycle that this neighborhood seems to feed into him: as an adult, he is a drug dealer himself, but is still receiving calls from both his now estranged mother and his childhood friend, Kevin. He visits the two and forgives them for their past actions (Kevin for taking part in a hazing ritual that ends with him beating Chiron up and his mother for not being available in his childhood) and the story ends with Chiron and Kevin in a budding relationship.

Now let’s look at La La Land. Mia is an aspiring actress from Hollywood. Sebastian is a struggling jazz pianist. The two seem to butt heads and appear at each other’s worst moments (a bit of road rage leads to Mia failing an audition; Sebastian tries to improv during a gig that Mia witnesses and is subsequently fired for doing so) but eventually they meet at a party. They inspire each other to try starting their own paths in their respective fields, blame each other for their failures, and eventually become successful, while professing undying love, which is then undermined when five years later, they reunite and Mia has married another man, though the spark is still there.

La La Land is at its core a whimsical piece of eye and ear candy, with no actual substance in its story. Tell me to my face that this rendition of “boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love as they go through trials, boy and girl go their separate ways but never forget one another” has any more substance than that. Even writing the synopsis I just did, I struggled to get to anywhere near as long as the brief plot description I typed up for Moonlight, and I definitely didn’t even hit everything that I wanted to about Moonlight at all.

Every performance or film that features people of color [that has been critically acclaimed] features a very visceral story. The characters are gritty and relatable and extremely real, for lack of a better term. They are the kinds of characters that we want to see succeed because we care for the people that they are, and the reason for that is that without a solid story or firm grounding, a piece produced by people of color will be ignored by the world at large. Meanwhile, white actors can flounce about in a technicolor world (a very well built one, I will add; I do think that La La Land does many a good thing aesthetically) and be considered “good enough” to be considered for Best Picture.

I’m not trying to disregard the other movies in this category; I could talk about Arrival or Hacksaw Ridge or Hell or High Water or Manchester by the Sea for just as long as I have these other works of art. From what I know, they all display the same level of mastery, and if any of these had won, I would be nowhere near as angry as I was when La La Land was first announced.

However, as a person of color in theater and as a friend to a person of color in film, when La La Land was mistakenly announced, I was angrier than I was that Piper won best animated short (and don’t get me started on that I wanted to wring that damn bird’s neck for making animation seem like a cutesy field all over again. fuck that bird). Because what the Academy did there, if that had been true, was make a statement that all that a white person has to do in order to wipe out the stories of people of color is make something that looks really cool and features a cute romance that would never happen in real life.

And that’s the message I’ve heard for more than nineteen years now and am really fucking tired of being peddled.

tl;dr: I’m tired of people failing to be recognized because the stories they created were deemed unimportant as opposed to a fairytale ending that features characters that are little more than porcelain dolls that crack at any small shortcoming.