Quentin Tarantino followed his one pattern from Pulp Fiction in his 1997 film Jackie Brown and it was to cast a fallen actor in the lead role. While he picked John Travolta in the former film, it was Pam Grier’s turn in Jackie Brown. At that point, she didn’t have a major role since doing the Blaxploitation films in the ’70s like Foxy Brown and Coffy.
Grier delivered a once-in-a-lifetime performance as the lead character in the film. She outperformed every single one of her co-stars and that’s telling because her co-stars were the late Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton.
Sadly, this performance was overlooked by the Academy at the 70th Oscars in 1998. Grier was a fan-favorite to win the Best Actress Award which made her snub from the nominations infuriating for movie-goers. It even adds to the long list of Oscar snubs faced by Black actors, giving Grier’s loss a racism angle.
Pam Grier’s Oscar snub hurts even after 27 years
Pam Grier was notably absent from the nominee list for Best Actress at the 70th Academy Awards. This was shocking since she earned nominations at every other award of the season for Jackie Brown, including the SAG, the Golden Globe, the Saturn Award, the Image Award, and all other similar honors.
Interestingly, some of the Academy’s nominees didn’t have such a great awards season. Her performance in Jackie Brown was rock solid. Quentin Tarantino revived her career with the movie and when he did the same thing with John Travolta earlier, the actor earned the nod for a Best Actor Oscar.
The Academy, somehow, was hellbent on not picking Grier among their nominee list. Fans felt they went out of their way to include Julie Christie as a nominee for Afterglow rather than Grier. It quickly became a controversy and was considered one of the biggest snubs in Oscars history.
It was worsened by the fact that the Oscar jury had picked an all-white list of actresses for the Best Actress category. In the end, it wasn’t Kate Winslet’s performance in Titanic or Judi Dench’s in Mrs. Brown that took home the Oscar statuette.
It was Helen Hunt‘s not-the-phenomenal kind of role in the feel-good romantic drama that received the Oscar. Grier has never been nominated for an Oscar in her life. It is high time that the Academy rectifies their mistake to some extent and considers her as a candidate for the Honorary Oscars.
Pam Grier gave a damn-good performance as Jackie Brown
Pam Grier’s performance in Quentin Tarantino’s underrated film Jackie Brown received love, unlike all her other performances before it. It was definitely a career revival for the actress, who was deemed a washed-out actress from the ’70s until then. Getting into the role of Jackie, Grier knew that she was in for one of her hardest jobs.
On the 25th year anniversary of the film, Grier told Yahoo Entertainment during an interview that Tarantino had warned her about the pace she had to keep. Grier’s character is an airplane stewardess, who gets caught while moving smuggled cash and drugs for gun-runner Ordell from Mexico to LA.
Jackie has to avoid getting arrested by the cops and she also needs to save her life from Ordell, who kills a man earlier in the film for losing his money. Brown comes up with a risky scheme to get herself out of the mess and she has to lie and manipulate her way through all the men for the rest of the film.
She enlists help from Ordell’s bail bondsman Max Cherry but does not reveal to him the entire plan. Grier shared that Tarantino asked her to slow down her pace to avoid revealing that she was planning a scheme. She shared:
Quentin said to slow my pace down to avoid revealing that I’m planning a scheme. Max (Robert Forster) knows people inside and out, and knows when they’re fooling him—he can smell me if I’m lying. But I also need him, so it’s not cut-and-dried.
The film was Tarantino’s only film to be based on a previous work, as he adapted Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. It also paid homage to Grier’s Blaxploitation films, portraying her to be cool and tough in her scenes. Grier’s character goes through a lot in the film and her manipulation even extends to the viewers by the end of the film.
The final shot, when the camera closes in on Grier’s face, will leave you with only one thought. This actress deserved every accolade out there for Best Actress for her exceptional performance. However, the Academy failed to see it.
Pam Grier’s snub is another example of the Academy ignoring Black actors
The Academy Awards have long been accused of being a White people’s affair. When Hattie McDaniel became the first Black individual to win the Academy Award in 1939 for Gone with the Wind, she was seated at a separate table at the event. She was even denied entry into the all-white afterparty.
Sydney Poitier became the first Black actor to win the Best Actor Oscar in 1963, thirty-six years after the inception of the awards. He continued to be the only one in the category until Denzel Washington won for Training Day in 2002.
This history strongly suggested that Pam Grier’s snub had a race angle to it. She was one among the long list of Black actors who were overlooked for their performances in Hollywood. The diversity row reached its peak when Black actors were completely absent from the nominee list in the acting categories of the 2016 Oscars.
There was backlash and people took to social media with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Chris Rock was brought in to host this edition and he addressed the controversy right on the nose, calling the Oscars “the White People’s Choice Awards” (via Variety).
Despite the Academy’s claims that they have addressed the issue in recent years, there is an Oscar fact staring at us right in the face. Only one Black woman has ever won the Best Actress in the entire history of the Oscars. And that was exactly what made Pam Grier’s snub an issue of discrimination.
Jackie Brown is now available for streaming on The Roku Channel.
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