Oscar fever

After winning the Golden Globe and BAFTA award, a stand-up comedienne known by her nom de guerre Mo’Nique is poised to become only the seventh African-American to receive an Oscar in seven decades – in this case, for supporting actress. She plays the overweight single mother of an overweight teenage single mother in Precious. She is therefore accused of participating in a plot perpetuating all the crudest negative stereotypes about black welfare moms. She drowns all references to such criticisms with positive babble, while also dismissing taunts that she doesn’t shave her legs with the defiant: “The only rules I can follow are mine.” This, at least, does strike me as an all-American attitude. She also says: “This movie is universal. And the people playing those parts just happen to be black people, but you can go into any community … and find those people.” She mentions an “Asian brother” who told her after he had seen the movie, “I am Mary Jones” (the name of her character in Precious). I knew it, I knew it – all those stories about Stalinist Asian-American parents locking their offspring up in iron cages and forcing them to sleep on broken glass after each B they receive, in order to get them a ticket into Stanford, it’s all a maliciously malign myth. Well, Stanford admissions do need to constantly fine-tune their standards and policies in order beat off those hordes of Asian geeks who would be superbly qualified to get in from a color-blind point of view. But there must be a different explanation for this kind of threat to racial balance on elite US campuses. In any case, I’ll hold my fingers crossed for Mo’Nique. And my heart goes out to the all those big Hollywood studios whose CEOs are now facing an unfamiliar challenge – of the 10 movies who top the list of contenders in various categories, only three have big names in leading roles to boast.