<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nWe know it's still early yet, but here's an Oscar scenario for you to ponder: Wouldn't it be a kick if this year's best-actor competition pitted four deserving black thesps against a token white dude for a change?\n\nOf course, it'll never happen. Tom Hanks is back this fall with two contenders, Captain Phillips and Saving Mr. Banks. (Is that the civilian sequel to Saving Private Ryan? you ask. Metaphorically, maybe so, since he's playing Walt Disney.) Leonardo DiCaprio is due. Even 77-year-old Robert Redford is getting early-bird buzz for his castaway role in All Is Lost.\n\nStill, that very vanilla crew\u2014and the only thing whiter than Redford is an Alp\u2014doesn't compare for sizzle with 2013's unprecedented clutch of actors of color grabbing for the brass ring. The gamut runs from Michael B. Jordan as BART shooting victim Oscar Grant in the poignant Fruitvale Station and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Steve McQueen's astonishing 12 Years a Slave to Idris Elba in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Isaiah Washington as D.C. sniper-spree perp John Allen Muhammad in Blue Caprice, and Forest Whitaker acing the tricky title role in Lee Daniels' The Butler, whose admiration for black America's pre-MLK stoicism\u2014only superficially subservient\u2014makes it one of the more complicated feel-good movies of our era.\n\nNotably, all five movies are based on fact\u2014a voucher of social importance black-centric flicks still need if they want a crossover audience. Even so, it's telling that three of the directors involved\u2014McQueen, Daniels, and Fruitvale Station's Ryan Coogler\u2014are black as well, laying claim to stories traditionally overseen by well-meaning white filmmakers (Norman Jewison) or even not so well-meaning ones (Quentin Tarantino). Kids today don't even remember when the only African-American director anybody knew was Spike Lee\u2014and even though Spike may secretly miss those days, we don't have to.\n\nLet alone the days when Denzel and Morgan Freeman were reluctantly splitting Sidney Poitier's uplifting but burdensome legacy. The real news about 2013's showcases for black performers is that they're getting to bring their A games without being constricted by tokenism's responsibilities. The crisp command Elba imbues with new infectiousness as Mandela, Whitaker's deep-in-the-woodwork approach to detailing characters as different as the Butler and Idi Amin, Jordan's showmanship-free naturalism, Ejiofor's emotional immediacy, and Isaiah Washington's paradoxically magnetic remoteness\u2014all those are very different skill sets, the kind white actors have always had leeway to maximize. You don't really picture Hanks fretting that his particular gifts might send the wrong message about white people in general, now do you?\n\nUnless the world turns upside down, none of these not-quite-marquee names will ever get short-listed to take over a blockbuster franchise's latest reboot, even though some of us can't help dreaming of Elba as the next 007. That may not be such a disadvantage, though. Considering the biz's racial history, it's a great joke that white movie stars nowadays are so often trapped playing cartoons\u2014and that black actors, more and more, are getting to play real men."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-on-academy-awards-oscars-2013>