Source: Frazer Harrison / Getty
It’s that time of year again when the post-Oscar buzz either has you on a big high, or it has you highly pissed off. Sadly, when it comes to representation for Black people, the latter usually happens more than the former.
At this year’s Oscars, however, there were some notable wins for Black people. Black Panther swept some important technical awards with Ruth E. Carter winning for Best Costume Design and Hannah Beachler winning for Best Production Design, making them the first Black women to win in either category.
Regina King also won Best Supporting Actress for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk while Mahershala Ali snagged the gold statue for his supporting role in Green Book.
Add a Best Adapted Screenplay win for Spike Lee, and Black people are winning, right?!
Meh.
When time came around for the Best Picture announcement, many people were surprised or just plain outraged when Green Book took home the gold. A lot of folks took their pain out on Twitter in the most hilarious way.
But before we get to that, if you haven’t seen or heard of Green Book, the movie based on real characters has developed quite a notorious reputation.
Although Mahershala’s performance in the movie was praised, the flick centers around Bronx-bred racist Tony Lip (played by Viggo Mortensen), who serves as the tour driver for acclaimed musician Dr. Don Shirley (played by Ali).
The movie explores race relations on a very shallow level, with Lip being portrayed as a White savior who defends Shirley from Southern White racists and introduces him to things like fried chicken and Little Richard…as if Shirley, a Black musician, couldn’t have possibly had fried chicken or heard of Little Richard.
Regardless if certain scenes were true or not, the movie painted Lip as a regular working-class White man who just happened to have some prejudices. More importantly, we should sympathize with him because he’s supposedly less racist than the Southern racist caricatures that we’re all-too familiar with in movies.
Many people slammed this one-note approach to race relations with shows like Late Night with Seth Meyers and Desus & Mero making parodies of the movie.
The family members of the real-life Dr. Shirley also dragged the film with Shirley’s younger brother Maurice Shirley labeling the movie a “symphony of lies,” according to Shadow and Act.
The title of the movie wasn’t even appropriate. The real-life Green Book, “The Negro Motorist Green Book” published by postal worker Victor Hugo Green in 1938, listed priceless info of safe eating establishments and lodging for Black people in the Jim Crow South. The Green Book movie barely covered this important info aside from a scene when Lip was handed a copy of the Green Book by a recording label executive.
All of these issues made Green Book‘s Best Picture win feel like another smack in the face to Black stories. When competing with Black-led films like Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman, the white-washed, White savior narrative won again.
Even creatives like Spike Lee couldn’t contain their frustration, considering the BlacKkKlansman director reportedly stormed out his seat when Green Book was announced as Best Picture.
Of course, many frustrations were let out on Twitter with White and Black users alike clowning the movie’s shallow take on race.
Because the Internet has no chill, many people also hilariously made fun of Green Book by comparing it to that one White person who tries waaay too hard to prove they’re not racist.
Hit the next pages for more spot-on tweets of how Green Book strikingly resembles your allegedly “non-racist” White friend.
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