The whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.

Nine years ago, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won hisand- her Oscars - he was only the second African- American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress.

Real change seemed to have come to movies, or at least to the Academy, which had given statuettes to seven black actors in the previous 73 years. (The first, Hattie McDaniel, won in 1940 for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.”)

It was possible, over much of the past decade, to believe that a few of the old demons of suspicion and exclusion might finally be laid to rest.

A look back at the American films of 2010 reveals fewer of the kinds of movies that have propelled black actors, screenwriters and directors into contention in the recent past. The superhero, fantasy and action genres were drained of color. The urban dramas were set in Irish- American neighborhoods. Even the male buddy picture, a staple of interracial bonding since 1958, when Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were chained together in “The Defiant Ones,” has become a largely white-on-white affair.

Has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Barack Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion - or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) has inspired puzzlement among his supporters and detractors alike.

American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity, with actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte playing detectives, judges - even God.

But partly because movies remain a top-down, capital-intensive art form, they have been cautious and apt to cater to rather than to subvert the perceived prejudices of the audience. In Hollywood, race has often been a social problem to be earnestly addressed (and then set aside), or a marketing challenge. In the 1960s the studios congratulated themselves for making sober, correct-thinking dramas that often starred Mr. Poitier in films like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both released in 1967 and which together reaped 17 Oscar nominations.

A few years later, African-Americans began to appear onscreen and behind the camera to an unprecedented extent. Faces and voices that had once been found only in “race movies” or art-house films by the likes of Shirley Clarke (“The Cool World”) filtered into the mainstream. There were blaxploitation hits like “Shaft,” as well as crossover dramas (“Sounder”) and popular comedies, including the trilogy “Uptown Saturday Night,” “Let’s Do It Again” and “A Piece of the Action,” directed by Mr. Poitier and starring him and Bill Cosby. The independent world saw the emergence of off-Hollywood directors like Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry and Julie Dash.

But race in American film has rarely been a matter of step-by-step progress. The 1980s were, with a few exceptions, marked as much by racial retrenchment as by the consolidation of the blockbuster mentality. More hopefully, the end of that decade ushered in a new generation of black filmmakers, most notably Spike Lee, who tried to beat the system and then joined it.

Mr. Lee and the African-American stars who ascended in the 1990s and the decade that followed - notably Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx and of course Mr. Washington - often had to shoulder the burden of representing their race even as they pursued their individual ambitions. For the most part, these stars rode to the top of the box office in stories that did not engage or address race, while the films that did take the subject on more directly - like “Ali” and “Dreamgirls” - often did so at a historical safe distance. It was almost as if, with the ascendancy of individual black movie stars, Hollywood no longer felt the need to tell stories about black people as a group.

This retreat partly explains the emergence of a newly separate black cinema with its own stars (Morris Chestnut, Vivica A. Fox), auteurs (Ice Cube, Tyler Perry) and genres. The prolific Mr. Perry has become one of the most successful directors and producers of any color.

Mr. Lee has been among Mr. Perry’s critics. “We’ve got a black president, and we’re going back,” Mr. Lee said in 2009. “The image is troubling.”

Has the cultural ground shifted and, with the economic crisis, made other kinds of stories feel more urgent?

It is hard to escape the impression that class made something of a comeback in 2010. “The Fighter” relates the story of working-class, boxing brothers from a former Massachusetts mill town. Set in the Ozarks, “Winter’s Bone” involves the violent, clannish world of crystal meth producers whose grandfathers likely ran moonshine.

So is class the new race? The racial complexity of American life seems to have stymied the collective imagination of the movie industry. For now, only one film seems capable of acknowledging the ordinary black man. That was Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable,” starring none other than Denzel Washington.


MANOHLA DARGIS AND A.O. SCOTT
ESSAY