At the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday, when Troy Kotsur, the deaf actor who is blisteringly powerful as the film’s crusty impassioned fisherman father, gave his acceptance speech for best supporting actor and recalled all the years he’d spent sleeping in cars and dressing rooms, he was referencing that history: the steep-to-vertical climb that deaf actors have had to make - even after Marlee Matlin, 36 years ago, busted down that door. But when something becomes the new normal, that’s revolutionary too.Īnd that’s the history that “CODA,” Sian Heder’s transporting family drama, is now in the middle of making. And that was history-making too: a recognition of the leap from the world of Poitier, who for too many years was Hollywood’s one and only Black movie star, to an era when Black actors achieving that level of success and recognition could be the new normal. But in 2001, there were three Black actors nominated for lead performance at the Oscars: Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball,” Denzel Washington for “Training Day,” and Will Smith for “Ali” (Berry and Washington both won, of course). Sidney Poitier made history by becoming the first Black actor to be a Hollywood star, as well as the first to win an Academy Award for best actor (in 1963, for “Lilies of the Field”). The Oscar campaign for “CODA” has touted the film as “history-making.” If you wanted to be a literal-minded curmudgeon about it, you could say that the history it’s talking about was already made - when Marlee Matlin, in 1986, became the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award for best actress, for her great, ardent, wounded performance in “Children of a Lesser God.” Matlin deserved to win (the other nominated actresses that year were Jane Fonda for “The Morning After,” Sissy Spacek for “Crimes of the Heart,” Kathleen Turner for “Peggy Sue Got Married,” and Sigourney Weaver for “Aliens,” which is the only one I’d put in Matlin’s league).
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December 2022
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