Viola Davis’ acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress began by thanking the Academy and this note: “You know, there’s one place where all the people of the greatest potential gather.”
Stop. Some viewers may have felt intense pain. He was Fences An actress about to give a sequel to Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech? Will the next line be “This Room,” to defend the presidentially denounced entertainment industry, to preach truth and inclusion, and to spark another skirmish over whether Hollywood is too selfish?
No, the next line: “One place, which is the cemetery.”
Whew. Davis’s speech quickly went viral and was widely praised for many reasons, the most important of which was good writing. She opened with a question and gave an answer that few could have guessed. She harnessed the power of surprise, a power that was evident elsewhere at the Oscars.
Viola Davis #Oscars parties My acceptance speech was amazing. Watch it here https://t.co/fs8vScFX3b pic.twitter.com/cope2GlkKv
– The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 27, 2017
The speech also explained why Davis deserved an Oscar. She seemed to be bursting with emotion, almost out of breath, yet her words were clear and her phrases were paced deftly. She pointed it out carefully How to get away with murder Annalize Keating’s character in the law lecture, but it showed the cruelty of feeling that Mrs. Miller was feeling doubt. But this was not acting. Or if so, it was so good that it didn’t seem so. Which, as Leonardo DiCaprio said from the stage elsewhere in the night, is the definition of great acting.
Most notable: the content of the speech. Most memorable Oscars usually make obvious political points, display gaffes, or set milestones. But Davis commanded attention by simply discussing the art, as well as by specific and sincere compliments to colleagues and loved ones.
“People ask me all the time: ‘What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola?’” she said. “And I say, dig up those bodies, dig up those stories. Stories of people who had big dreams and never achieved those dreams, people who fell in love and lost. I became an artist — and thank God I did — because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live.” life”.
The resonance with Davis’ work was clear: Fences The film is based on August Wilson’s play about a working-class black family in the 1950s, the members of which are not famous, and who simply struggle and fight against the backdrop of society and history. Wilson “exhumed the remains and bones of ordinary people,” Davis said. His story was “about people, words, life, forgiveness, and grace.”
But the resonance with other themes of the night and afternoon was also unmissable. The films nominated for Best Picture included many tales of the invisible and culturally disenfranchised: Texans deprived of opportunity in the post-recession era. Hell or high waterlow-level mathematicians at NASA have been mostly forgotten by history Hidden figuresOrphans and needy families in India Lion. Most notable is the Best Picture winner moonlight It reveals the story of a poor black gay man who lives a simple, ordinary life of the kind that is depicted so infrequently as to seem extraordinary.
So there is, in fact, a politics here, albeit a subtle one. In the context of conversations about diversity and inclusion at the Oscars and in America more generally, Davis’s praise of stories about ordinary people with thwarted dreams necessarily has a political meaning: depicting the previously undepicted struggles of what it means to live non-white, straight, wealthy people. And/or a male issue.
She reinforced this point, lightly, when she thanked her sisters and recalled: “We were rich white women at the Tea Party games.”“. They played white and wealthy, perhaps, because that was what society told them to imagine. Davis has demonstrated the power of offering alternatives.