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Channel 5's "Hollywood's finest season - best black actors"

Monday, February 22 2010, Blog, wim

Right, so I was watching some crap on channel 5 a couple of days back. During one of the commercial intervals, they advertised a bunch of films as part of their "Hollywood's finest season". This time, the films centered around "Hollywood's best black actors".

I got some issues with that. Before you all start screaming, stay with me for a second or 30.

• Why the distinction 'black' in the first place? Surely first and foremost, the black actors, are actors. Just like yellow, red, white and purple ones?
• I find it offensive. Not positive discrimination. Just discrimination. Why? Because the colour of one's skin doesn't have any bearing on their acting. So why include that as some kind of categorisation? We would all be offended if Channel 5 announced a "Hollywood's finest season - best white actors", and rightly so!
• If we say, OK, but the black actors are a minority, fine, but I'm sure so are the vertically challenged actors. No prizes for guessing that this category would be dominated by Mr. Trollfoot, Danny DeVito. And so are the ginger haired and pimpled ones (Julianne Moore, Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman to name a few). Can't see that happen any time soon, can you?

I understand the need for categorisation for "Hollywood's finest", and it's a fine line. But to base it on an actor's skin colour is no different than basing it on their religion (I can see it now: "Hollywood's best Kabbalah actors"), nationality or sexual preference as far as I can see. Instead, they should categorise it just per film genre, or as they already also do, simply per actor.