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Why Black Panther Should Win Best Picture
The race for Oscar!
Black Panther should win Best Picture at Oscar 2019 because the films about Black people in Africa that have walked away with that honor, have featured the damning narrative that elevates Whiteness with the trusted “White Savior” complex, that Hollywood loves to propel to the heights of notoriety because of how it validates the sovereignty of colonialism and slavery.
Take for instance the best picture victory of the “epic romantic drama” Out of Africa in 1985, and how the film that was “loosely based” on the book by Isak Dinesen, who was really a Dutch woman named Karen Blixen, sweepingly captures the privileged exploits of an adventurous aristocrat in Nairobi, British East Africa. The mere fact that Baroness Blixen was able to endure the wildness of her rugged resort in the middle of a game reserve, while also taming the brutishness of her loyal Black servants, gave her the audacity to detail her experience in a best-selling book, that later became a box-office success, before becoming an award-winning masterpiece.
In The Heat of the Night was the big winner of 1967, and while the screenplay that was uprooted from the…
