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“Can you at least acknowledge that forcing diversity onto a cranky old beast such as Hollywood might result in some fresh ideas and fresh faces on our screens?”
OPINION: I thought the way the internet mercilessly mocked all the middle-aged white guys getting upset over a black Ariel in The Little Mermaid would signal the end of anti-diversity nonsense, but alas, there’s always one more disgruntled old fart available to throw a tantrum over something that won’t affect him in the slightest.
The manchild du jour was once one of my faves, and appears in three era-defining films, films that mean a lot to me personally, too: Jaws, Close Encounters, and Stand By Me: Richard Dreyfuss.
His beef is with the Oscars, which he insists will ruin movies / the arts / the noble craft of acting / his life by ensuring that only films that meet at least two of the Academy’s diversity criteria will be eligible for the Best Picture category.
“It’s art,” Dreyfuss railed in the same manner that 2-year-olds rail at having to sit on the potty. “No-one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
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Please note: the “latest, most current idea of what morality is”, means including all sorts of people at every level of the film-making process, you know, just for a change…
He then went on to ask the question no-one wanted him to ask: “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man?”
Richard. Dicky. Dick. No-one has wanted to see white people play black people at the movies in more than 30 years, mate. Give it a bloody rest.
The only actor in recent years who was allowed to get away with it was Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder. And even then he only gets a pass because his entire character is about mocking nitwits such as Dreyfuss who think slapping on some foundation and pretending to be another race is an artform worth cherishing.
I don’t even care that this silly old fart has decided to shoot himself face first out of the clown canon of obscurity into the ever waiting arms of online outrage. He’s just the next in a long line of silly old farts who won’t get it because they don’t want to.
Stuff
There’s always one more disgruntled old fart available to throw a tantrum over diversity, finds Kylie Klein-Nixon.
(Last month it was Kiss’ Paul Stanley failing to understand trans folk, next week it’ll be someone else failing to understand some other simple concept it would have taken them three minutes and an ounce of empathy – if they had any – to get to grips with.)
What gets me is that Dreyfuss’ attitude also advocates for the one thing we can surely all agree Hollywood should never be: bloody boring.
It’s how we’ve ended up with the same five white guys being the “face” of Hollywood for more than a decade.
How many naff war movies do we actually need Chrises Pratt and Hemsworth to make? Do we really need 10 more Batman films starring Robert Pattinson? Really? Why is Brad Pitt still a thing? Ditto Leonardo DiCaprio. And don’t even get me started about Tom Cruise. Just… why?
It’s not streaming that killed the movie star, it’s our obsession with white male leads.
Yes, Pedro Pascal is having a moment, but the entire planet falling head over heels for one Latino actor does not mean Hollywood has pirouetted gracefully over the diversity finish line and can therefore rest on its laurels.
We definitely don’t have much to talk about if your cage feels rattled by suggestions that maybe we don’t need non-Jewish actors playing Jews, or that no-one cares what colour a mermaid is so she might as well be black – you know, just for a change. But can you at least acknowledge that forcing diversity onto a cranky old beast such as Hollywood might result in some fresh ideas and fresh faces on our screens?
It might mean more Beef and Bridgerton, more Everything Everywhere All At Once and Parasite, more Nope and Lovecraft Country. More opportunity to meet people and travel to places we might never have outside the picture house (or your living room if you’re strictly streaming).
That’s not just a good thing for folks who might otherwise have been overlooked, shut out or too intimidated to try to get into the film industry, or for our understanding of one another, it’s a good thing for us as film and TV fans.
And yeah, maybe it will mean fewer Richard Dreyfusses and people that look like Richard Dreyfuss, but probably not.
At the same time as the actor was demanding his god given right as an artist to don blackface and play Othello, a completely bonkers film called Tetris was sitting at the top of the streaming charts over on Apple TV+.
It features the very white, very Welsh Taron Egerton playing real-life game developer Henk Rogers, a Dutch bloke of Indonesian descent. C’est la Hollywood.
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