This is a historic year, but I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm about black folks winning Academy Awards. While winning the coveted Oscar is often considered the high mark of one’s career, there are many examples of when the academy failed to recognize the best film made in a given year or even the best actor or actress nominated. I will never forgive the academy for failing to nominate Do the Right Thing for best picture. That year the Oscar went to Driving Miss Daisy.

It would appear that as usual, what's old is new again.   Yet even by modern Hollywood standards, the mere act of humanizing Black domestic characters who were denied lines and had long stood silently in the shadows of white stars in countless iconic films including Father of The Bride, is revolutionary.   While they may appear to simply be masculine and feminine versions of each other:  Both focus on changing attitudes regarding race in American society, and both focus on generational and cultural divides between parents and their offspring.   

Steve McQueen's masterful 12 Years a Slave has already changed history in two major ways: It is the first Hollywood-backed movie on slavery directed by a black filmmaker, and based on Solomon Northup's 1853 oral account, it is the first film ever based on an actual slave narrative. While the former results from the dearth of black directors who are able to get historical dramas funded and distributed by major studios, the latter reveals a more troubling truth.