Fruitvale Station opens with shaky cellphone footage of a young man being shoved to the ground of the Fruitvale BART train station platform in Oakland, Calif.
The sound is muffled, and the video quality passable at best. Still, distinctive shouting is audible, and the image is unmistakable: Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, is being held down by two white police officers while those filming and watching within the BART station scream and protest.
One officer shouts, “I’m going to taze him, I’m going to taze him. I can’t get his arms. He won’t give me his arms. His hands are going for his waistband.”
The other officers urges the first to step back. He complies. He subsequently claimed he thought he was reaching for his Taser, when in reality he reached for his gun, and fired into Grant’s back. The BART train left the station with more than 50 witnesses to the fatal shooting of an innocent man at the hands of law enforcement officials. The video ends there, as the horrified witnesses were pulled away from the Fruitvale BART station. It is noted that according to eyewitnesses, after being shot, Grant cried out, “You shot me! I got a four-year-old daughter!”
After the available footage runs out, the duration of the movie begins with an actor assuming the role of Grant as he goes about his daily business on what would ultimately be his last day alive — Dec. 31, 2008. Grant was shot in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009 while riding the BART train back to his home in Oakland with his girlfriend (the mother of his four-year old daughter). While on the train, he became involved in an altercation when a man who recognized him from former shady dealings swung at him and attacked.
Police officers were called to the scene, and his girlfriend pushed him into another car so to avoid having to deal with enforcement officials. Officers stopped the train completely to investigate the situation, and pulled off all black males, ignoring the white man who had actually started the fight.
Justifiably, Grant and his friends are incensed, loudly and audibly complaining about the racial profiling at play. Repeatedly, Grant asks why he has been pulled from the train while the others involved have walked free. The officers are irked. They aren’t gentle or forgiving, and they handle the men on the platform roughly, slamming Grant to the ground when he attempts to stand up.
This is when one of the officer begins to shout he is resisting arrest — for failure to cooperate with police officers. Within a matter of seconds, he is shot while lying face down on the ground of the BART station, with horrified onlookers screaming from within the train cars. While he lies on the ground in agony, another officers handcuffs and searches him, before medical assistance arrives. He dies later that morning, at the Bay area hospital, with his girlfriend and daughter acting as silent, grief-stricken witnesses to his final moments. Grant was 22 years old.
Fruitvale Station received widespread critical acclaim upon its release last July. The movie is powerful to the core, with standout performances by Michael B. Jordan as Grant and Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer as Grant’s mother. It was the darling of the Sundance Film Festival, which is usually a strong indicator of an Academy Award-winning performance.
The message of the film is urgent—and by giving a face to racial profiling and violence in this country, it memorialized Grant and reminded the audience that the United States is not post-racism by any stretch of the imagination. Why, then, was it not nominated for any Academy Awards, and why does it matter than it wasn’t?
The Academy Awards are distant from everyday life, it’s true. Hype is built around the outfits of the stars, and over-attention given to the magic of Hollywood. Most Americans have not had the chance or interest to see the films nominated in the most visible of categories—Best Picture—by the time the Awards air. In many ways, the Academy Awards are Hollywood patting themselves on the back. That being said, once winners are announced and the televised broadcast is complete, interest in winning films spikes considerable. Buzz is generated, and messages are spread. This is why Fruitvale Station garnering no nomination matters.
Out of several films released last year with stories directed by, starred in, and about African-Americans, only 12 Years a Slave received nominations. Is 12 Years a Slave a phenomenal film? Absolutely. But one can’t help but feel that Fruitvale Station was ignored, along with Lee Daniel’s The Butler, because the stories they told were just too close to home in terms of span of time. Grant was the victim of a race crime just a few years ago, in California.
The Academy’s snubbing of Fruitvale Station can be seen as a demonstration of unwillingness on the part of the Academy to bring the story of Grant, a man profiled and ultimately murdered at the hands of a white police officer, to national, widespread visibility. The Racism Review, a national online publication, put it best, “The real problem for Fruitvale Station is that it’s a film about racism without a happy ending. It’s about a tragedy that cannot be redeemed. Not that it’s even a particularly radical film — it just can’t pretend that time has solved the problems it portrays, as 12 Years a Slave does.” It is important that we see films like 12 Years, but it is crucial we discuss and remember films like Fruitvale Station, in order to change our reality.
