BIAS? Brie Larson Thinks Too Many “White Dudes” Are Watching Her Movies

Here's more from the Washington Examiner:

As the actress embarks on a publicity tour for the first female-led Marvel movie, Brie Larson has a message for white males: Move to the back of the line. 

The Oscar winner said she picked Keah Brown to interview her for a recent Marie Claire profile because the journalist has cerebral palsy and is a woman of color. That’s commendable. Less so is Larson’s posturing. 

“About a year ago,” Larson explains in the interview, “I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male.” 

Shifting that dynamic and elevating an obscure journalist by asking her to profile you is a kind thing to do but also, and I want to add this without cynicism, it's a great way to get good press. 

Here’s what Brown says about Larson in her Marie Claire story: 

Meeting Larson in person for the first time, it’s immediately clear why she was chosen for this role. Passionate, funny, genuine and kind, she’s eager to see the diverse and inclusive world she lives in reflected back on the big screen. She might not be a superhero in real life, but she’s ready to fight like one to make the world better. 

Would a white male have said that? Well, we’ll never know. 

Despite Larson’s fixation on gender, Manohla Dargis, a female movie reviewer at the New York Times, was not in love with “Room,” the movie that gave Larson her Oscar for Best Actress. 

White males from Rolling Stone and New York magazine liked her performance much more. To Dargis, Larson was an "overly muted supporting player." But Rolling Stone’s Peter Traverse called her "magnificent," and New York magazine’s David Edelstein said he didn’t "know how to do [her] justice." 

Nevertheless, the “Captain Marvel” star still wants dudes to put down their pens and tape recorders. She made a noninclusive point about inclusion last summer when she argued that male movie reviewers should shut up about “A Wrinkle in Time” because it wasn’t made for them. 

“I don’t want to hear what a white man has to say about ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I want to hear what a woman of color, a biracial woman has to say about the film,” Larson said during an acceptance speech. Never mind that “A Wrinkle in Time” was a film that everyone desperately wanted to like but was about as close to the book as Earth is to Madeleine L'Engle’s planet Camazotz. Even a white man could see that.

And from Fox News:

Ahead of the upcoming release of “Captain Marvel,” actress and star Brie Larson reportedly chose a female journalist who has cerebral palsy to interview her after coming to the realization that her previous press tours had a tendency “to be overwhelmingly white male.”

Journalist Keah Brown, who sat down with Larson, described herself in Thursday’s Marie Claire UK piece as being someone who writes “about pop culture, disability (I have cerebral palsy), blackness and womanhood.”

Brown acknowledged in the article that Larson had “requested” her to conduct the interview, which she said was “game-changing” and “the biggest opportunity I’ve had.” After asking why she was selected, the actress discussed a trend that she’d noticed.

“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male,” Larson said. “So, I spoke to Dr. Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that.”

The aforementioned study was conducted on the 100 highest-grossing films in 2017 and determined that white males made up 67 percent of the top critics, while white women comprised less than 25 percent, according to the New York Post.

Additionally, men of color reportedly made up 10 percent, while women of color yielded a quarter of that percentage.

Following the study, Larson said in the Marie Claire interview that she resolved to make her press days “more inclusive.”

“After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of color, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others,” the Oscar winner went on to say.

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