The green-room chat would be worth listening to when Charlotte Rampling and Idris Elba, two magnificent British actors who have taken starkly opposed positions on one of the most contentious issues in film today, meet at an awards ceremony in London.
The Evening Standard film awards take place on Sunday evening in London. Elba, nominated for the Evening Standard award for best actor, and for almost every other screen award going, is one of the black actors strikingly missing from the Oscar nominations, where the all-white awards lineup has led to stars including Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith, and the director Spike Lee, announcing they will boycott the ceremony.
Rampling, who has been nominated for an Evening Standard award and an Oscar for best actress for her role in 45 Years, declared on French radio that the diversity controversy was “racist to whites”. She has since said her words were taken out of context, but she went on to say: “One can never really know, but perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list.”
Elba has avoided public comment on the Oscars snub to his own talent, but remarked “welcome to diverse TV” as he arrived at the Screen Actors Guild – where he picked up outstanding performance by a male actor awards for his roles as the commander of a boy-soldier army in the Netflix film Beasts of No Nation, and in the television series Luther.
However, Elba did address the issue of diversity in casting head on in a speech at the Palace of Westminster to a gathering of MPs and television executive at a Channel 4 event. Elba, who made his reputation with towering performances in the US series The Wire, said talent was being thrown on the scrap heap, and he had been forced to leave the UK to look for greater opportunities, having seen the glass ceiling for black actors. “I was very close to hitting my forehead on it.”
He added: “Although there’s a lot of reality TV, TV hasn’t caught up with reality. Change is coming, but it’s taking its sweet time.”
The Oscar nominations also left out Michael B Jordan in Creed, Will Smith in Concussion, and Samuel L Jackson in The Hateful Eight.
The row led to agonising over the composition of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is overwhelmingly white, male, and middle aged. The Rev Al Sharpton tweeted that it typified the lack of diversity in senior positions in Hollywood: “Like the Rocky Mts. The higher u climb the whiter.”
In January’s Critics Circle awards, Rampling won best actress, and her co-star Tom Courtenay won best actor, for their roles in 45 Years. However Matt Mueller, editor of the industry journal Screen International, speaking in the wake of her French radio remarks, was among many who felt that, whatever the merits of her performance, she hadn’t improved her chances of a taking the Oscar.
“Charlotte is the rank outsider in this category so I don’t think her Oscar chances were all that strong even before the French radio interview,” he said. “But certainly these comments aren’t going to help her cause. They will not go down well with American Oscar voters at all.”
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Oscar diversity row: Rampling and Elba could meet at London awards
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