According to a 2018 study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that looked at the gender, race, and ethnicity of critics reviewing top domestic films, 82% were white, and nearly 78% were male. Nearly 90% of those condidered "top critics" were white.
In many Oscar bait movies, interracial friendships come with a paycheck, and follow the white character’s journey to enlightenment.
Each term my film students watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works. Most students of color feel Lee’s character did the right thing while the majority of white students cannot understand why Mookie would do such a thing to his boss. Why this reaction—term after term, year after year?
Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.
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