Oscars 2021: Hollywood may earn brownie points for diversity, but still lags behind in celebrating Black women’s musicality-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Oscar history has been made, again. For just the second time, two Black women — Viola Davis (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) and Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) — are nominated for best actress in the same year. This last happened in 1973 when Cicely Tyson (Sounder) and Diana Ross (Lady Sings the Blues) were up for the Academy Award, only to lose out to Liza Minnelli for her starring role in Cabaret. While we do not know who will take home the gold statue on Sunday, it is undeniable that Davis and Day gave two of the most mesmerising performances of the year.

Despite the fact that it has taken almost 50 years for Oscar history to repeat itself, I hope these nominations indicate a more substantive change in Hollywood, an increase in the number of multidimensional roles offered to Black actresses as well as wider recognition of their standout performances by the academy. But my optimism is also tempered. As much as Hollywood is changing, the way it tells the story of Black women’s musicality still lags behind. For while Davis and Day should be lauded for their exemplary work, their movies overemphasise the trauma and diminish the artistic genius of the icons they embody, Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday.

In some ways, this is a genre problem. Far too many films about music relegate actual processes of music-making — song composition and arrangements, studio sessions and band rehearsals, an experimentation with sounds and a honing of craft — to the background, preferring to focus on the psychological and social struggles that artists face.

Both Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The United States vs. Billie Holiday represent the singers more as victims of their social circumstances than virtuosos, potentially obscuring the contributions of two of the most innovative, influential American figures to ever sing onstage.

“Billie Holiday was one of our most innovative artists,” Farah Jasmine Griffin, the author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, told me. “Certainly she requires a kind of innovative and experimental representation to tell her story. But, there’s often a refusal with women artists, especially with Black women, to do that in film. It’s easier to talk about pathology actually.”

The movie is ostensibly about how the anti-lynching anthem Strange Fruit became so inseparable from Holiday’s career that she was under constant FBI surveillance. But we never fully understand why it is her version that endures.

“That song had a life before her, but the reason why it became famous is that she agrees to sing it and interprets it in a certain way,” Griffin said. The film doesn’t go into any of that, she noted, “and that’s where the courage is, right?”

The tension between Black women’s personal traumas and their musical talent also drives much of the plot in National Geographic’s television miniseries, Genius: Aretha (starring Cynthia Erivo) and the HBO documentary about Tina Turner, Tina. The themes of sexual assault and domestic violence are present in Aretha Franklin’s story. (Both Genius and The United States vs. Billie Holiday were written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.) But it is Franklin’s musical precocity, not her pain, that is the basis of this miniseries, her exceptionality and her vulnerability.

In the miniseries, one way her father, the well-known Rev CL Franklin, nurtures his daughter’s vocal dexterity and piano skills is by taking her on the road, exposing her to his own brilliant preaching style and to great gospel singers like Clara Ward. But on tour, the minister is distracted by sex parties and often leaves his daughter defenseless against sexual advances by older men.

In reality, Aretha Franklin never publicly disclosed the details that led to her giving birth to her first child at age 12, and a second one at 15. In the miniseries, these pregnancies remain shrouded in silence, and are treated mainly as events that neither she nor her family dwells on as she goes on to share her unparalleled gifts of music with the world.

At first, Tina treads on narrative territory similar to that of the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (for which Angela Bassett was nominated for an Oscar for best actress).

The first half of this documentary focuses on Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock, learning how to sing as a teenager in a Black Baptist church, joining Ike Turner’s band in the late 1950s and surviving the extreme emotional abuse and violence that he, as her husband and musical partner, inflicted on her for more than 16 years.

But midway through, the film flips this familiar story on its head. Tina Turner repeatedly emphasises how much work she has done to overcome her past trauma and reveals how the media focus on her as a survivor of abuse is so limiting to her and her musical legacy. The boldness of her comeback, which included her first solo album, Private Dancer in 1984, and her singular blend of grit, gospel and gravelly vocals have been repeatedly erased, Turner reminds us, by interviewers. In the 45 years since she left Ike, they have asked more often about her relationship with him than her musical inventiveness.

Still from Soul

Ultimately, it is another Oscar-nominated film that offers up the most unencumbered depiction of Black women’s musical virtuosity: Soul, the animated Pixar film, with its revered jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams (coincidentally voiced by Bassett). Partly because we know so little of her backstory, she comes across as an icon, and is the musician whom the film’s protagonist, pianist Joe Gardner, most wants to play with and emulate.

“There is an unspoken narrative in jazz that the men play the music and the women sing,” Terri Lyne Carrington, a jazz drummer and founder of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, told me. “But, in Soul, we can actually hear Dorothea’s virtuosity as both a saxophonist and as a bandleader.”

Salamishah Tillet c.2021 The New York Times Company