Straight Outta Compton may not have received as many Oscar nominations as people were hoping for, but one YouTuber’s doing his best to fix that by re-cutting the film into an inspirational ‘Oscar bait’ film.
The only problem is, to do so, he had to make it all about a white guy.
There’s a lot of justified anger at the moment that, despite being the highest-grossing film by a black director ever, Straight Outta Compton didn’t receive as many Oscar nominations as people were expecting.
To make matters worse, the only nod the film got was for its screenplay which was actually written by two white guys, and the cast haven’t even been invited to the ceremony. Awkward…
Eventually, the movie’s producer Will Packer spoke about the Academy’s decision to exclude the film, saying:
Those of us in the industry who labour to make the best content we can are especially sensitive to a perceived systemic bias against a group of people or type of film.
However one YouTuber, Super Deluxe, decided to take a satirical side swipe at the old stuffy Academy and re-cut director F. Gary Gray’s gritty film about the rise and fall of the Compton, California hip hop group N.W.A. into something the Oscars lot may find more palatable.
Namely, a film about a kindly white person, Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller, taking pity on the poor young black men and helping them form their rap group.
It’s actually quite a funny trailer, in a darkly satirical way.
It whitewashes (pun intended) the decades of racial injustice that Compton dealt with and instead makes it the story of a white hip-hop pioneer and N.W.A. creator Jerry Heller, a courageous man who risked his reputation and sparked a music revolution, becoming the most important figure in hip-hop history.
Of course, no film is truly an Oscar contender without dramatic close ups of people yelling, replete with splashes of triumphant orchestral music, and this re-cut delivers the usual awards bait tropes by the bucket load.
The worst thing is, I could actually see this version of Compton doing well with the Academy…
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.