The Time Marlon Brando Boycotted Oscars to Protest Hollywood's Treatment of Native Americans
For the second year in a row, only white actors were recognized when the Oscar nominations were announced earlier this month. People were upset, and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite began trending immediately. Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and others have announced they will boycott the ceremony.
Mark Ruffalo, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor, considered boycotting as well, but ultimately decided to attend in support of victims of clergy abuse. Can you imagine, though, the tension in the room if Ruffalo, a prominent nominee, were to have boycotted? What about if he actually won and wasn't there to accept the award? It would have been a powerful gesture, to say the least.
This recalls the time Marlon Brando boycotted the Oscars, in 1973, when he also was nominated—and not for a supporting role in an ensemble cast. No, that year the Academy would honor Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, and with it Brando's portrayl of Vito Corleone, one of the most iconic acting performances of all time.
Brando knew he was going to win Best Actor, which is precisely why he boycotted the ceremony in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. Attending on his behalf was a Native American activist named Sacheen Littlefeather. When Brando's name was called, she took the stage in traditional garb before refusing to accept the statuette from presenter Roger Moore. She explained that Brando "very regrettfully cannot accept this generous award, the reasons for this being...are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee."
Later that year, Brando sat down for an interview with Dick Cavett. The seasoned interviewer was visibly intimidated by Brando's presence, and both men know it. After a few minutes of awkward banter, the host mustered up the courage to ask the question on everyone's mind. As Brando sipped from a mug, Cavett said: "If you had the Academy Awards night to do over again, would you do any of that differently?"
After a long pause, Brando said that no, he wouldn't have done anything differently. "I felt there was an opportunity," he said. "Since the American Indian hasn't been able to have his voice heard anywhere in the history of the United States, I thought it was a marvelous opportunity to voice his opinion to 85 million people. I felt that he had a right to, in view of what Hollywood has done to him."
He continued to address Hollywood's treatment of minorities:
I don't think people realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian, and a matter of fact, all ethnic groups. All minorities. All non-whites. People just simply don't realize. They took it for granted that that's the way people are going to be presented, and that these cliches were just going to be perpetuated. So when someone makes a protest of some kind and says, 'No, please don't present the Chinese this way.' ... On this network, you can see silly renditions of human behavior. The leering Filipino houseboy, the wily Japanese or the kook or the gook. The idiot black man, the stupid Indian. It goes on and on and on, and people don't realize how deeply these people are injured by seeing themselves represented—not the adults, who are already inured to that kind of pain and pressure, but the children. Indian children, seeing Indians represented as savage, ugly, vicious, treacherous, drunken—they grow up only with a negative image of themselves, and it lasts a lifetime.
It's convenient in 2016 to say that Hollywood has made a lot of progress since 1973. It has, of course, but how much of that progress is real progress? How much has Hollywood's marginilzation of minorities simply been repackaged in a way that is more palatable for studio executives and moviegoers? What Brando said in 1973 is still true today: People don't realize what the motion picture industry is doing to minorities.
Earlier this week, New York Times film critic Wesley Morris—who is black—responded to the fallout following the Oscar nominations on The Bill Simmons Podcast. Morris spoke about how the problem isn't necessarily the Academy, but that the black films that didn't receive nominations weren't promoted as "Oscar films" by the studios that produced them. "Despite the fact that Straight Outta Compton came out at the height of summer and made a lot of money, it seemed like Universal was kind of caught off guard about whether to put this movie in front of Oscar voters for consideration," he said. "Unfortunately that's how this process works. You can't organically become part of the Oscar conversation, in most cases. You have to have a studio sort of push you in front of Oscar voters."
Part of the reason these films were not packaged for the Academy's consideration, Morris says, is an "institutional racism when it comes to what people in this town think 'an Oscar movie' is."
He continued: "One of the things that hurts Creed is that the Academy is used to thinking about black people in a certain way and Hollywood is used to thinking about black people in a certain way, If Creed were about a runaway slave who gets to box? If Creed were about a butler's son who gets to box?"
