[This coming weekend marks the 60th anniversary of Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Poitier performances, leading up to a special post on a handful of 21C actors carrying his legacy forward!]
On what
was unquestionably historic about Poitier’s Oscar, what wasn’t quite, and
what’s importantly outside of that framing.
I started
this week’s series by highlighting the work of my favorite FilmStudier, Vaughn
Joy, so it’s only appropriate that I end the series by doing the same: for a
delightful and engaging but also thoroughly thoughtful and analytical take on
the history of the Academy Awards, including questions of diversity and
representation therein, I highly recommend this
episode of Liam Heffernan’s America: A History Podcast featuring Vaughn. As
they get into at length, the Oscars have been frustratingly bad when it comes
to racial/ethnic representation—which also means that we have to recognize the
genuine (if frustratingly slow and haphazard) significance of historical steps
in that direction. Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black man to win an
Academy Award, and the first Black performer to win in the Best Actor or
Actress categories, in 1964 for his performance in Lillies of the Field (1963) was such a historic step; the fact that
it was long overdue, and the not-unrelated fact that it would be nearly 40
years before another such Best Actor or Actress win (2001, when both Halle
Berry and Denzel Washington took home Oscars in those categories), are
important contexts but do not diminish Poitier’s achievement in the slightest.
I can’t
lie, though—it’s also a bit frustrating, and at least somewhat telling, that it
was Lillies for which Poitier won his
one Oscar. Don’t get me wrong, Poitier is great as
always in Lillies, playing itinerant laborer
Homer Smith who finds himself trapped in a convent doing the Lord’s work (or
rather the nuns’ work, but in a pointed running joke the head nun Mother Maria
[Shirley Booth] keeps thanking the Lord instead of him). And I’m not going to
suggest that his character is anywhere near as limited nor stereotyped as the one for which the
only prior African American Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, took
home her trophy. But nonetheless, of the couple dozen films that Poitier starred
in across the 1950s and 60s (as I discussed in yesterday’s post), Homer is to
my mind one of the least nuanced or interesting characters, a relatively straightforward
comic role, one that uses the character more to make symbolic religious points
than to offer the kinds of emotional and human truths that were at the heart of
Poitier’s consistently, complicatedly compelling performances. And I’m not sure
it’s a coincidence that this one, rather than all those others, was the role
which won him the Oscar.
On the
other hand, the Academy Awards are of course far from the only way to measure
either a performance or a film’s significance. On the first note, Sidney
Poitier gave many of the best film performances of the 1950s and 60s (and over
the next few decades after), whatever happened in awards season. And on the
second, I do think there’s at least one really important element of Lillies of the Field—that it features a
Black man living in a convent with a group of largely white nuns for months,
and the situation is presented as both humorous and symbolically resonant but
never, not even for a second, as fraught. Considering that one
of the first historic American films featured the racist myth of Black
rapists as a central plot element, and that none other than the film which won
Hattie McDaniel her Oscar used that same myth as a driving
force in the plot of its second half as well, it’s not at all insignificant
to note the absence of even the slightest intimation of those racist narratives
in Lillies of the Field. That doesn’t
make this one of Poitier’s most important or interesting performances, but it
does make it yet another way he and his films profoundly affected Americana
culture and society.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?
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