May 06, 2014

Wil Haygood, who wrote the article that inspired the movie, Butler, says Academy Award judges have a "cultural blind spot" against black productions

30 minutes

['Wil Haygood\'s story in The Washington Post in 2008 about the late Eugene Allen, a butler who served eight U.S. presidents, inspired the 2013 film, The Butler. Haygood is a Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He argues that Hollywood\'s mainly white judges for the Academy Awards have a "cultural blind spot" against black productions which hurt the movie\'s chances of winning a nomination. The film starred Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Lee Daniels was the director. Haygood wrote a book that accompanied the movie and was an associate producer of the production.', OrderedDict([('@xmlns:itunes', 'http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd'), ('#text', 'Wil Haygood\'s story in The Washington Post in 2008 about the late Eugene Allen, a butler who served eight U.S. presidents, inspired the 2013 film, The Butler. Haygood is a Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He argues that Hollywood\'s mainly white judges for the Academy Awards have a "cultural blind spot" against black productions which hurt the movie\'s chances of winning a nomination. The film starred Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Lee Daniels was the director. Haygood wrote a book that accompanied the movie and was an associate producer of the production.')])]

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