The New York Times reports that the release of a new film on the subject of one of the most famous Civil War photographs is still being delayed largely because of its star Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars. The film, called “Emancipation,” tells the story of “Whipped Peter” (aka Gordon), a badly scarred African American man who escaped from slavery in Louisiana during the Civil War and went on to serve in a Black regiment.
The movie from Apple was directed by Antoine Fuqua, with a script by William Collage, and filming finished in February. It already has Oscar buzz, but Will Smith’s widely condemned attack on Chris Rock has been said to have diminished its chances at the Academy Awards. Smith himself has been banned from the Oscars ceremony for the next decade and the Times says that Academy members who want to move on from the March 2022 incident may be hesitant to vote for a film starring him.
If the film is released before January 1, 2023 during the lucrative Christmas release season, it would be eligible for the 2023 Academy Awards with the memory of Smith’s actions on voters’ minds. According to the New York Times:
Though Mr. Smith can still be nominated for his work, the reaction to the slap means the Oscar chances for “Emancipation” have dimmed exponentially.
Bill Kramer, the newly installed chief executive of the film academy, said on a recent call with reporters that next year’s show will not dwell on the slap, even in joke form. “We want to move forward and to have an Oscars that celebrates cinema,” he said. “That’s our focus right now.”
The presence of “Emancipation” would make that difficult. Stephen Gilula, the former co-chief executive of Fox Searchlight, the studio behind such Oscar winners as “12 Years a Slave” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” said releasing the film in the awards corridor between now and the end of the year, would put undue pressure on the movie and make the slap the center of the conversation.
“Regardless of the quality of the movie, all of the press, all the reviewers, all of the feature writers, all the awards prognosticators are going to be looking at it and talking about the slap,” Mr. Gilula said in an interview. “There’s a very high risk that the film will not get judged on its pure merit. It puts it into a very untenable context.”
To some, the film may be too good to keep quiet. Apple set up a general audience test screening of “Emancipation” in Chicago earlier this year, according to three people with knowledge of the event who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss it publicly. They said it generated an overwhelmingly positive reaction, specifically for Mr. Smith’s performance, which one of the people called “volcanic.” Audience members, during the after-screening feedback, said they were not turned off by Mr. Smith’s recent public behavior.
Many more Africans sold/traded or bartered other blacks into slavehood than whites did.
Along these lines, certainly before Roman times, the “Slavic” Country’s lowest were taken by the Greeks, North Africans and more abundantly by Roman’s, the last group promulgation whites into life-long Slavehood.
More relevant to the unfortunate fellow in this particular picture, bear in mind that in the late 1600’s- late 1700″s there was a group native to Africa, known as the “Flagerators”. This same Sect moved through parts of Eorope in the 1400’s in an effort to protect a village or groups of church-goers from the Plague.
Thus, while no one knows for sure the machinations of this poor Soul’s scars, history must be taken into account, no matter the ugliness of it’s outcome.
Do you feel guilty? Did the Holy Sprit compel you to speak? Why did so many abuse in the name of Christianity?