What Hollywood Keeps Getting Wrong About Race
Wesley Morris joins us to talk about “Green Book”, the latest Oscar winner to focus on a white character’s moral journey in an interracial friendship.
Three decades ago, the highest honor at the Academy Awards was given to a movie about a white passenger learning to love her black chauffeur. Sunday night, the same award was given to a film about a white chauffeur learning to love his black passenger. We look at Hollywood’s obsession with fantasies of racial reconciliation.
.. “Green Book” focuses on a white driver, played by Viggo Mortensen, and a black musician, played by Mahershala Ali, in the 1962 South.
Wesley Morris examines why tales of interracial friendships born out of employment are repeatedly rewarded at the Oscars.
“Green Book,” a segregation-era buddy film, won this year’s Academy Award for best picture, prompting anger from those who criticized the movie as a simplistic take on race relations.
Listen to an episode of “Still Processing” that revisits Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing,” which was snubbed by the academy in 1990, the year the racial reconciliation fantasy “Driving Miss Daisy” took home the top honor.