The Real Reason the Oscars Snubbed Danielle Deadwyler's Brilliant Performance in 'Till'

Hollywood continues to suffer from bias, but it's not always the kind you expect

Screenshot from Till by author. (Fair Use)

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When Emmett Till was murdered in 1955

I was seven years old and in the first grade at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School. I remember seeing the photograph of his badly beaten face in Jet magazine, the glossy pocket-sized publication that brought news of the Black community to our mailbox every week. Even now, the boy’s face, photographed in a casket, bears little resemblance to anything human.

Because I was a child, it reminded me of a toy set we had called Mr. Potato Head, which came with a set of push-pin ears, eyes, lips, and various articles of clothing you could stick into an actual potato or any other vegetable. The results were comical and grotesque, and we kids enjoyed playing with it.

That photograph of Emmett Till was also grotesque. 

And when I understood that it was not a fake like images of aliens you saw in supermarket tabloids, but a picture of an actual 14-year-old boy who had been beaten to death, shot in the head, tied with barbed wire, and dropped in a river — I shook my head in disbelief.

What could anyone have done to deserve such a horrible punishment? My mother certainly knew the answer. And it is no exaggeration to say that we lived in the shadow of the Emmett Till murder for the rest of my growing-up years.

Yes, his death jumpstarted the triumphant Civil Rights Movement. But those were fraught years for us. For every act of heroism that followed the Till murder, there seemed to be an equal and opposite act of cowardice. Like the murder of Medgar Evers and those four little girls who died in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

My mother worried 

whenever I participated in high school exchange programs that included white kids, lest one of the girls should take a shine to me. When one such girl mailed me her photograph during sophomore year, my mother lost it.

Tearing it up on the spot, she said: “Don’t you realize what could happen if you got stopped for a traffic violation and some white cop saw this girl’s picture in your wallet?”

That was the summer of 1964, nine years after Till’s death. And I said, “Mom, you can stop worrying. We have civil rights now.”

Her face dropped, and she looked at me disbelievingly as she said: “Boy, are you crazy?”

Danielle Deadwyler

We are all creatures of the times, places, and circumstances we were born into. The Black men and women of working-class segregated America are a vanishing breed. And it takes a special talent to capture the tremulous aspirations of Black forebears whose lives were shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and the daily denigration of separate-but equal schools, colleges, public transport, hotels, restaurants, churches, waiting rooms, hospitals, bathrooms, and drinking fountains.

But Danielle Deadwyler, who played the mother of that tragic 14-year-old boy in the movie Till captured their essence. Her mannerisms, speech patterns, and facial expressions were spot on. 

Deadwyler’s performance was hailed by virtually every major film critic in the United States and abroad. She received nominations for best leading performance by a woman from the Golden Globes, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA), the Critics Choice Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild. As well as a slew of nominations from the NAACP Image Awards and other regional and minority-focused organizations.

So how come she was snubbed by the Oscars?

Perhaps Till was not a great film.

Having grown up in the shadow of that terrible lynching, I was not looking forward to witnessing his brutal killing all over again in a movie. This sentiment was confirmed for me after a high school friend, who saw the film in a theater, could not stop herself from crying during the entire drive home.

But I had met Danielle Deadwyler and her son at the home of another friend a few years earlier. (Deadwyler and that friend’s daughter were best friends growing up). Her hair was braided, and she wore a pair of tight white slacks. There was nothing phony about her. And yet, in an understated, down-home sort of way, she was the epitome of Black girl magic. 

Her mahogany-brown skin, wide penetrating eyes, and natural magnetism set her apart from light-skinned actors whose mixed-blood heritage give them a leg up in a world where colorism still holds too much sway from Hollywood to Hip Hop.

Since then, my friends had kept me up to date on her career in films like Station Eleven, Jane & Emma, and The Harder They Fall. Now that she had a starring role in Till, I didn’t want to miss it in spite of my misgivings. Even if I never met Deadwyler again in person, I was raised during a time when every adult was your parent even before “It Takes a Village” became a truism. It was in me to support her if only from a distance.

Unfortunately, what should have saved the film 

may have also doomed it. The movie’s Nigerian-American writer-director Chinonye Chukwu chose not to focus on the brutality of Emmett’s death. Her film is about the boy’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley. How she found the strength and courage within herself to seek justice for her slain child.

But critics who had nothing but praise for Deadwyler felt the story lapsed into predictable tropes and depended too heavily on the courtroom-drama format we’ve seen all too often.

This didn’t bother me, since I was glad to be spared the brutal bits. But I found it interesting that some critics said the film was not brutal enough. They compared it to Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave. Those films wallowed in violence, and audiences loved them for it.

Comic-book movies dominate today’s big-screen. 

Even the culturally-affirming Afro-futurist Black Panther winds up in a fist-pounding scene with his adversary while Wakanda’s army engages in a brutal Black-on-Black battle with its enemies. Not only are audiences used to violence like this, they expect it.

Perhaps Till needed the approach that worked for Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We don’t need to see Emmett Till murdered all over again. Not when today’s news serves up cases like George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and too many others to name here.

The only way to elicit the violence audiences crave from a story about Emmett Till is to free the story from history and retell it the way we wish it had turned out, as Tarantino did with the Tate/LaBianca Murders. We needed the bad guys to be annihilated. 

Someone needed to turn a flamethrower on the two men who lynched that 14-year-old boy back in 1955. As for that trashy white woman who confessed years later that she lied when she told her husband Till whistled at her—we needed a scene that left her covered with melted chocolate while a colony of red ants were let loose to eat her alive.

Bottom Line

Blinded by glamour, we don't really want to know that the Academy Awards do not really reward excellence. That show, like the rest of the awards season, is really about sales. It’s a cleverly orchestrated promotion event designed to boost movie sales and shore up the industry’s bottom line. The red (now champagne) carpet is about selling dresses, jewelry, shoes, and reinforcing the false beauty standards

Jessica DeFino

writes about in her excellent publication

The Unpublishable

.

Back when I was still involved in television, an A-list actor and voting member of the Academy confirmed this for me during an interview. We tend to vote for movies that make money, he said.

Unfortunately, the movie Till failed to break even. It lost nearly $10 million. If we’re being honest, we must acknowledge that the bottom line may have kept Danielle Deadwyler from receiving the nomination she deserved.

But how then to explain that Cate Blanchett was nominated for Tar, which lost $13 million dollars against a reported budget of $35 million? And what about Sarah Polley’s Oscar for Women Talking, which lost a whopping $127 million against the $135 million it reportedly cost to make?

Hollywood has come a long way since #OscarsSoWhite back in 2015. But its members still seem to cut along the bias. Which is fine for cooking and fashion. But cutting at an angle to make things appear more interesting doesn’t always make them more fair.

©2023 Andrew ‘Jazprose’ Hill

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