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'American Fiction's' Oscar shows not all movies by Black directors need to be about violence and poverty

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Hollywood took a chance on Cord Jefferson and a story that was not about one of perennial tropes of films about Black people. It paid off at the Oscars and the box office.

In a night of Oscar awards that seemed to mostly ricochet between the brilliant “Oppenheimer” and the bizarre “Poor Things,' the adapted screenplay award for “American Fiction” by Cord Jefferson was a moment of triumph for Black storytellers. The smart, compelling satire about a Black academic and frustrated writer who finally capitulates to the thirst for stereotypical novels by Black authors about gangs and ghetto life was based on the 2001 book 'Erasure' by Percival Everett.

Here is another case where someone did give a chance to a Black writer and first-time film director and it succeeded without a king’s ransom being spent in the process. And Jefferson’s success has another lesson: Stories about Black people don’t have to be about guns, gangs and drugs in order to sell to Hollywood. That’s not what diverse storytelling is about.

 

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