Oscar boycott may be validated with Stallone’s nomination for playing Rocky

Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith have announced they’re boycotting the Oscars because of what Lee called “another all-white ballot.”

Again this year, no black actors got Oscar nominations.
And this is a sampling what people are saying in the blogosphere under the hashtag “#OscarSoWhite”:

“The best actors are white! Lets stop complaining and just start stepping our game up, right?” one woman said. She’s being sarcastic by the way.

“You know you believe Hollywood has a race problem, or you believe straight white men are just better at making movies,” another woman said. She is not being sarcastic.

On a site called BlackTree TV, film critic Shawn Edwards had a tempting hypothesis. He talked about actor Jason Mitchell who plays gangster rapper Eazy-E in the film Straight Outta Compton. Mitchell wasn’t even nominated, and Edwards theory is that Academy voters, being mostly white, think that playing a rapper for a black actor is like playing yourself.

“Here’s a problem with a performance like this: I think that a lot of people who have the power to vote think that’s him,” Edwards said. “They think Jason Mitchell is Eazy-E. Therefore, it wasn’t really a stretch.”

Edwards argues that Mitchell’s lifestyle is nothing like Eazy-E’s. But no nomination for Jason Mitchell.

And yet somehow Sylvester Stallone got nominated again for playing Rocky Balboa a role he’s now played seven times!