Image: Jonathan Bean via Unsplash
It’s Friday and we’re still talking about the snow that isn’t here yet.
Grocery shelves are reportedly empty, although truth be told I found all but one item on the list last night at Walmart.
Schools, businesses, churches, and even the state government are already closed and we may or may not have seen the first of the flakes.
This morning after our weekly Friday morning prayer service at church, many of us dispersed to our homes to hunker down for the weekend.
The snow is coming. We have food. We have water. We’ll actually be quite comfortable as long as we keep power.
C’mon, Dominion, we’re pullin’ for ya.
I’m writing this on Friday morning and somewhat unrealistically thinking of all the things I can accomplish this weekend. We’ll see how that turns out.
I have writing projects, and art projects, and cleaning projects, and lines to learn.
And, sometime before Thanksgiving we need to take down the Christmas decorations.
Most of this week has been talking about the storm.
Then there was the Sarah Palin endorsement of Donald Trump. Fascinating.
Frightening, but fascinating.
Also in the news if you follow the entertainment industry is the uproar over the Oscar nominations and the fact that, for the second year in a row all of the nominees are white.
Truth is, I’ve seen virtually none of the nominees other than Star Wars which got nominated mostly for technical stuff.
People are boycotting the Oscars, which is their right, and they’re asking Chris Rock (who is hosting) to do the same. I’ve not heard his response.
But, and I totally qualify this as coming from my perspective as an aging white-guy, semi-professional actor, I wonder if the emphasis is being placed on the wrong issue, or maybe the wrong venue.
I mean, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. To paraphrase Dr. King…
“I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by their performance as their characters…”
In other words, the Academy should be voting based on performance, not the ethnicity of the actor.
Michael Caine said in an interview this week, “You can’t vote for an actor because he’s black. You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to vote for him. He’s not very good, but he’s black. I’ll vote for him.’ You have to give a good performance.” [Entertainment Weekly]
Hear me out. I’ve told you before that I realize my perspective is different than that of persons of color. I can’t know what a person of color thinks or feels. I just don’t have that depth of experience.
But, it seems to me that the problem is not necessarily the Academy Awards, but the industry. Most of the voters in the Academy are white, and that’s going to take time to change.
I don’t think boycotting is going to bring about that change. I could be wrong. Then again, I just don’t do boycotts, for any reason.
Maybe this will indeed bring attention to the issue, because I totally agree that an all white list of nominees is not representative of Hollywood and certainly not representative of this country.
In the time I’ve written this, and pondered over whether or not I wanted to go down this road, the snow has started falling. Flat surfaces are already covered.
I’m going to go look at beach pictures.
Stay safe. Stay warm.
Stay inside.