Michelle Rodriguez has made a career out of being spicy and Latin (and dying in every movie), and the way she’s cast is no accident – she’s a real hot tamale! She was recently at an amFAR event at Cannes, where a reporter for Vulture asked her about The Paperboy, the movie where Nicole Kidman showers Zac Efron in a visible pee stream, which Rodriguez had just seen.
The following quote is what happens when you mix booze, reporters, Nicole Kidman’s pee, and Latin spice:
“I loved The Paperboy!” she told us. She wasn’t daunted by some of the pans for the Lee Daniels–directed movie? “I say f*ck them because they don’t get it,” Rodriguez replied. “He’s so good at keeping me entertained. When I don’t like the dialogue, I’m amused by the visuals. And when I don’t like the visuals, I’m amused by the dialogue. It’s always switching up senses. I’m intrigued by his ability to capture me in a theater. It’s not easy to capture me in a theater — I’m ADD like that.” As for those outrageous Paperboy scenes where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron and arrives at a very loud hands-free orgasm, “I f*cking loved it,” Rodriguez enthused. “One of my friends said, ‘She’s going to get nominated for an Oscar for that.’ I was like, ‘Nah, man. She’s not black!’ I laugh, but it’s also very sad. It makes me want to cry. But I really believe. You have to be trashy and black to get nominated. You can’t just be trashy.“
Aw, poor MichelleRod. She’s going to get a lot of crap for that quote because it sounds like she means that black actresses get some kind of special treatment. But that’s not what she meant. Actually it’s almost the opposite. Luckily for you, I’m well-schooled in PC clichés, so I can break this down for you: what she meant was the oft–repeated accusation that the Oscars only reward black actors for playing “demeaning” roles. (The usual dumb cliché that white washes a lot of nuance, like that Mo’Nique in Precious and Denzel in Training Day were really good at playing villains and deserved to win; and the fact that the corollary character, the “dignified black” or the “magic negro,” is just as racist and twice as pervasive). I’m pretty sure she was trying to say that if you’re a black actor, acting trashy helps you win awards, but it doesn’t have the same effect if you’re white, because the world is racist and Oscar voters don’t like watching white people act trashy and blah blah blah. More tiresome than offensive, really, if she’d said it right. Which she didn’t. Basically, that quote is what happens when you get high school dropout actors trying to parrot half-assed grad school essays. The consequences can be disastrous.
[pic via WWTDD]