abolut Halle winning an Oscar for exposing herself, just as Denzel had won one for being an asshole. Let me try to find it....
Here it is. I think it makes some valuable points--perhaps points the posters in the Berry thread in LBN can't really negotiate. Anyhow, I think it's interesting and I encourage you to read the whole thing at the link.
But from the much more modest room where I sat at home, the black mini-sweep was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Look a bit beyond the dazzling significance of the awards themselves -- and in these victory-starved times, that can be tough -- and you have the dull residue of two performances that, for all the thespian elaborations by Washington and Berry, are at their core ironclad black stereotypes that have been with films and pop culture so long, we don't question their viability as real characters anymore (if indeed we ever did). The roles were not so much created as occupied by the latest people willing to spend the two or three months it took to shoot them: If Washington playing a cop whose thug bravado gets the best of him in Training Day and Berry as a poor, uneducated single mom and wife to an incarcerated absentee dad on death row in Monster's Ball mark some kind of artistic breakthrough for black actors, then please, somebody stop me. As a former actor, I hasten to add that I'm not objecting on principle to single moms and conflicted policemen who are black, or any other color; any role can be transcendent, of course, and the academy in fact has favored protagonists who are underdogs or fringe-dwellers in an inimitable American sense -- Norma Rae, Taxi Driver, Coal Miner's Daughter. But these characters were all intimately examined and thus read larger than the circumstances of their lives, while the black antihero remains stubbornly exempt from such examination and so almost always reads as criminal and immoral or, at the other extreme, victimized and noble. Washington must be given a world of credit for nuancing potentially hollow men in his career -- the restive slave in Glory, the wrongfully imprisoned Hurricane Carter -- but the critical lather over Training Day felt more like collective relief that he was finally letting go of the good guy and playing what all black men are born to play: hoods. With all the swooning over his performance, I went to the theater expecting to see a complicated morality tale along the lines of The Godfather or Casino; what I got instead was Menace II Society with an updated soundtrack and the nervous white presence of Ethan Hawke as big bad Washington's rookie sidekick.
It was Hawke, by the way, who was the guy with a fleshed-out back-story and something to lose, the sympathetic character caught in the terrifying flotsam of black nihilism, with Washington as its grinning tour guide. Training Day was to me the latest addition in a sorry but hugely profitable genre of film I've dubbed ghettotainment, which since the '80s has purported to depict urban realism but in fact churns out a kind of sociological pornography that is more fantasy than anything real. Call it Survivor with production values. For all his skill, Washington could hardly overcome the traps of Training Day, though maybe he deserves an award for surviving the project with his famous dignity intact. People have said I shouldn't complain about his win -- the academy gives prizes for subpar performances all the time when the actor has a sterling body of work that has been overlooked once too often. Washington certainly qualifies for this sort of political payback, but that it would be paid for Training Day says less about politics and more about the kinds of roles the moviemaking elite is most comfortable seeing black actors in, and what they're most comfortable rewarding them for.
I AM FAR LESS CONFLICTED ABOUT HALLE BERRY. While I appreciated her acknowledgment, once she tamed the hysteria, of forebears like Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, I didn't appreciate her baring her ass and generally stooping to conquer in Monster's Ball. I don't think Lena or Dorothy would, either. Not because black women shouldn't be naked onscreen or hew to some impossible double standard of public image, but because everybody involved in the film had to smell the stink of possible exploitation in the camera lingering for five minutes on a black woman having butt-grinding sex with a white stranger on her living-room floor. A black woman who was dressed in short skirts, hot pants or tight T-shirts in practically every frame for no good reason. (Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich had a good reason, but what's Berry's excuse?) And here was a film ostensibly about the perils and pitfalls of racial exploitation, falling all too willingly into the ditch more than once; that tendency tainted the movie for me early on, and the fact that Billy Bob Thornton wound up, like Ethan Hawke, being the white rube guided to some personal illumination by the black icon didn't help. But Berry turned out to be in the right place at the right time, the clear beneficiary of a movement within the academy -- the counter of all the mudslinging and vicious Oscar campaigning -- that it was high time to give the best-actress statue to a black woman for the first time in its history. It was unquestionably overdue. Berry has no sterling career but provided enough of an opportunity with Monster's Ball, and the academy took it. The most distressing thing is that she may have even done a credible job in the movie, as Washington may have too, but the damning context in which they did it renders the question superfluous.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/19/cakewalk-kaplan.php