*Recently Screen Actors Guild Award winners Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer stopped by to have a spirited conversation with Tavis Smiley about the ambivalence that some African Americans have regarding their Oscar nominations for playing maids in “The Help.”
In the clip below, Smiley starts the interview by saying:
“I celebrate the two of you. I’m delighted that you were nominated [for Oscars]… and yet I will admit to you. There is an ambivalence here…There is something that sticks in my craw about celebrating Hattie McDaniel so many years ago for playing a maid… here we are all these years later and I want you to win, but I’m ambivalent about what you are winning for.”
Davis responded: “That mindset you have, and that a lot of African Americans have is destroying the black artist.”
Check out the clip:
So in response to Tavis’ belief that he has a sort of ambivalance over the idea of another black artist winning an award based on the same role (A MAID Hattie MacDaniel played eons ago, Viola says
“That mindset you have, and that a lot of African Americans have is destroying the black artist.”
Well damn Vi. I guess you just made the hip-hop/Soul Plane/The Cookout argument all in one.
@musb, Preach!
The headline caught my attention. Immediately I asked myself what “Black ambivalence” is. Better yet, what’s ambivalence, period? So I looked it up and found that it’s basically the liking of a thing on one hand and the dislike of that same thing on the other. Being that I haven’t seen it – I’ve come close a few times – I can’t say whether I’m ambivalent or not. But then a thought came thru and it asked me, “could your ambivalence be the reason why you haven’t [seen it]?” That was a good question. I think I’ll see it to answer for myself. And then another thought said, “maybe all the advertisements and trailers have already shown you enough”. Umh.
The most important thing I took from the clip was the question Viola asked. She said, “Do I always have to be noble?” It struck a chord with me! If only we could answer it objectively, though. And that’s a challenge, if even possible, because everybody’s noble won’t be the same. It’d be cool to have some type of yardstick to measure what’s noble and what’s not. Back in the day, that yardstick was ‘community’. We were able to know these things because we had more of a one-mindedness between us. Still just like everything else, one-mindedness had its own pluses and minuses but the pluses definitely seemed to outweigh the negatives. It’s not anything to do in one sitting but we can look for ourselves at the characterizations played by us and try to determine, in a general sense, which ones are closer to noble versus the ones farther from it and tally it out. Those would be some real interesting numbers.