Tony Earnshaw: Don't play the race card - the Oscars aren't a black and white issue

About 50 years or thereabouts.But the back-and-forth trading of invective, with the likes of Spike Lee and best actress nominee Charlotte Rampling both falling back on accusations of racism, risks clouding the real issue within a fog of frustration.

The smart commentary has come from those less interested in rabble-rousing or skewed statistics. Yet Sir Michael Caine was slammed for suggesting black actors should be patient. He also pointed out he would vote for the best performance, not for an actor based on his or her skin colour.

Many dismissed him as too old, too white and too out of touch with modern Hollywood. Others saw him as a voice of reason. Yet his comments ran parallel to the thoughts of rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube, who reckoned that complaining about lack of Oscar recognition was tantamount to bemoaning too little icing on your cake. Perhaps the actor David Oyelowo, lauded for his performance as Martin Luther King in Selma, was right to feel slighted when he wasn’t nominated. But for the likes of Spike Lee to lead the charge against the Academy, damning its membership and selection procedures as “lily white” and representative of an aging, largely white generation of filmmakers was merely a form of clumsy agitprop. Jada Pinkett Smith stepped forward to boycott the Oscars and was rapidly followed by husband Will Smith, who some felt should have been nominated for his role in Concussion. Yet Smith’s reaction felt like solidarity with his wife’s stance. Nothing wrong with that. But being painted into a corner left him nowhere to go. He’s consequently been denounced for the hypocrisy of daring to be a superstar with a conscience who lives in a $42m home. And yet… The Oscars has always been the biggest show on the planet – a gaudy, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory advert for Hollywood. Of course it needs a shake-up and the people running it are unlikely to be the ones to effect any meaningful change. Spike Lee, with his anti-Hollywood, defiantly independent stance on film, is not going to salve the festering wounds. Instead it may fall to perceived authority figures – men like Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington and even the venerable Sidney Poitier – to talk sense and bring the various factions together. There are those within the Hollywood establishment that will take note of this year’s furore and seek to remedy the problem. But playing the race card is not the way to win the argument. That way lies madness.