Race and 'Ray'

This weekend, a collection of well-coiffed, well-dressed, and well-endowed celebrities will stand on a Southern California stage in front of a glamorous, celebrity-filled audience and millions of television viewers, opening envelopes that announce the winners of the 77th Annual Academy Awards. For most Americans, it will be a one-night diversion, a meaningless opinion poll – the results of which would be quickly forgotten but for the millions of dollars of followup advertising hawking the prize winners.

For many African Americans, however, this year's Oscars will have a far different meaning: the awards will be a symbolic referendum on whether America has finally come to see and accept African Americans – the real African Americans, what and who we are when we go back to our communities at night and toss off our shoes and shut out the outside world – or if we will have to wait a little longer.

They will be watching what happens to the movie Ray, both in the Best Picture category, and in the nomination of Jamie Foxx as Best Actor.

This quiet vigil in black neighborhoods and bars and living rooms has gone largely unnoticed outside the black world. The mainstream media tends to paint race with the broadest of all strokes – are there minorities represented, or are there not? – often overlooking the subtleties that actually make up the American racial world. And so there was intense mainstream coverage of the selection of Sidney Poitier as best actor in Lilies of the Field in 1963, because no black actor had ever done that before. And 39 years later, after the sweep by Halle Berry (Monster's Ball) and Denzel Washington (Training Day) of the Best Actor/Actress categories, it was widely considered that black acting had arrived, that blacks were now fully appreciated in the movie industry, and that story line was dead.

Part of why black concerns over this year's Oscars have been overlooked is the obvious question: what could black folks possibly have to be concerned about this year? Foxx himself has two nominations – one for Ray, one for Collateral – while fellow black actors Morgan Freeman (Million Dollar Baby) and Don Cheadle and Sophie Okenedo (both for Hotel Rwanda) are also up for Oscars.

Among African Americans, however, Foxx's nomination stands out. And that is because Ray is a far different major-release movie than we have ever seen on American screens. In a combination of content, pace, and presentation, "Ray" is a black movie.

From the Spielberg-Oprah Winfrey Beloved collaboration to Carl Franklin's Denzel Washington vehicle Devil In A Blue Dress, John Singleton's Boyz n The Hood, and Spike Lee's entire body of work, black-themed movies with black lead actors and majority black casts are no longer an anomaly in American film. But in many ways, these movies were like Gershwin's 1920's era folk-opera Porgy: black themes showcased – sometimes highly successfully – in a white form. Ray, however, almost literally flips the script, blending content and form in a way that only can be described as "black." Only Charles Burnett's 1990 To Sleep With Anger comes close, and Anger, despite an all-star pairing of Danny Glover and Mary Alice, went unnoticed at the box office.

One of the major themes in Ray Charles' work was his combining of blues and gospel music into a single piece, bridging a secular-spiritual split that had divided the black community since the days of the slavery-time cotton fields. (That split is highlighted in the movie in the "all y'all going straight to hell" devil music scene, when a minister and his flock try to bust up one of Charles' club sets in the middle of his straight-out-of-gospel song "Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So.")