THE most awaited award on Oscar night is always to the best picture and after 86 years, the academy finally gave it to the first black movie from a black director.
In 2011 director, Danny Glover struggled to get funding for an all-black cast.
Glover was making a biopic of Haitian independence hero Toussaint-Louverture who led the first rebellion against slavery.
With an impressive all black cast that included Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among others, Glover struggled to get funding.
“Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project… where are the white heroes?” Glover told Agence France Presse.
“I couldn’t get the money here (France), I couldn’t get the money in Britain.”
There has been so much attention given to the movie 12 Years A Slave based on Solomon Northup’s biography.
Not only because it is a slave movie, but because many people contrasted it to Alex Hailey’s 1977 Roots which was more graphic and heart wrenching.
Some audiences feel other slave movies should have had the same Oscar attention hence its compensatory on the part of the white panelists.
While Roots traces the life of a slave from Gambia to the America’s, Northup’s story starts with a free man tricked and sold into slavery.
The story unfolds like the typical black man’s plight kind of narration.
Northup is captured, stripped, beaten and dehumanised by the white race and unfortunately his fate lies in the hands of that particular race that finally grants him freedom.
Named Platt by the new slave owner the audience soon realises that Northup’s unassailable situation is without end.
He finds favour with the new Master Ford who appears to favour him but will not release him.
It kind of reminds one about the predicament of Africa and the black race where we find a few kind gestures from those that manipulate our economies in the form of aid they still will not let go.
Eventually after 12 years he is rescued.
While the story is really about Solomon’s fight to survive 12 years in bondage, it is also about Pastey played by Nyong’o whose story becomes intertwined with Northup’s.
When Northup is freed the audience is sad because he is powerless to rescue another down trodden victim Pastey.
It becomes painful to watch the human spirit crushed to the point that it stops to fight and instead begs to die.
In one scene, Pastey, who is the object of the master’s sexual fascination and obsession to the disdain of the white madam, begs for Northup to kill her and drown her in the river.
Yet she is proud to be the boss’s best cotton picker.
This is the sad reality of the black spirit crushed beyond recognition for centuries.
It begins to empathise with the white abuser.
The man who eventually sends for Solomon’s calvary is a Canadian man Bass acted by Brad Pitt.
Even as Bass listens to Northup’s story he is afraid of being caught associating with the slave.
Today, post independent Africa is over time coerced to forget the colonial past and once again find solution from the white hand that has stretched to them.
It has been received with some mixed feelings by the international audience.
In Africa, there were celebrations that ‘Africans’ the dark skinned ‘Kenyan’ Lupita Nyongo and for ‘Nigerian’ Chiwetel Ejiofor had won acclaim at the BAFTA.
It was a first for an African name to be called out at the ‘prestigious’ Oscar awards, but the triumph was bitter sweet.
The bitterness comes from the fact that these black actors no longer have the black connection besides their African sounding names, but the sweetness was that it was a black production.
Others felt Steve McQueen’s, 12 Years A Slave did not project the true nature of the racist America.
Because McQueen won where others failed suspicion naturally arises.
Many wonder whether it is white man’s guilt or the involvement of brands like Brad Pitt in the production.
The white audience squirms in their seats when such films they would rather forget get centre stage.
For others the Oscar no matter how begotten is a reminder that slavery existed and that perhaps it is about time it received recognition.