Will Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe Ever Get Another Decent Role? Not In Shallow Hollywood

Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe

Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe don’t need my career advice. If they were to ask me for it though, I’d tell them this: enjoy the ride. It won’t last.

Hollywood loves you now.   Just don’t count on them embracing you.

The cold hard truth is there isn’t a lot of roles in Hollywood for plus-sized sistas. Mo’Nique and Gabourey are not going to have careers like Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock. There are no romantic comedies with Will Smith gazing in rapture into Gabourney’s eyes. Mo’Nique will not play Lady Macbeth or squeeze into leather and spandex to replace Halle Berry as Storm in another X-Men movie. It’s not going to happen.

The movie industry is extremely harsh on women. Ask Kathleen Turner. Ask Angela Bassett. Get a little older, don’t apply Botox to chase away the wrinkles and when gravity begins to take its toll, you’re scrambling for jobs on television, slob comedies and Tyler Perry schlock fests. Plus-sized women catch hell when they’re White. It gets no easier when you throw color in the mix.

Mo’Nique’s Best Supporting Actress made her the fourth Black woman to win the award, joining Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Hudson. Halle Berry took the little gold man home as Best Actress in Monster’s Ball, a movie widely despised by every Black person I know who have seen it. That isn’t to say there aren’t Black people who love the movie. I just never met any that have.

Jennifer Hudson hasn’t made enough films to be included in determining what type of career she may have. She apparently has dropped 60 pounds to play Winnie Mandela in a bio flick so good for her. It’s just unfortunate actresses have to hire personal trainers and diet like mad in order to pursue their livelihood. There’s the way the world should be and the way the world is and it doesn’t look to be changing around in favor of the fat folks anytime soon.

The thing about winning an Oscar is how it’s no guarantee of better scripts and better roles. Mo’Nique has no new film projects lined up. Maybe she’s choosy and wants to do something special instead of another brain-dead Martin Lawrence comedy. Then again, perhaps things are quiet on the Mo’Nique movie front based upon the fact that her phone isn’t ringing off the hooks with calls from Spielberg, Scorsese and Tarantino begging to work with her.

When you’re a Black woman in White Hollywood, you can be celebrated and you can win awards, but will you find steady work? It ain’t necessarily so as the career arcs of Goldberg and Berry following Oscar wins demonstrate.

Goldberg won acclaim in 1985 for her first film, The Color Purple, but had to wait five years for Ghost to actually win an Academy Award. Twenty years later and Goldberg hasn’t even sniffed another nomination.

Whoopi was nominated for Best Actress. Once.

Berry’s career is a cautionary tale on how to completely squander your post-Oscar buzz. Take on projects that either cater to your vanity (Perfect Stranger), are supposed to show off your acting chops but nobody bothers to go see it (Things We Lost in the Fire, Gothika) or total stinkers (Die Another Day, Catwoman). Berry’s last movie, Frankie and Alice where she plays a women with multiple personality disorder (one which is a raving racist) wrapped in January 2009 but has yet to be released. None of this is a good sign for Berry’s continued status as an A-list star.

Shock jock Howard Stern recently ripped into Sidibe saying, “There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie,” Despite being wrong about Sidibe’s post-Precious film prospects (her next movie is Yelling to the Sky ), Stern isn’t completely off-base.

Precious was the little movie that could and Sidibe has benefited from the enormous good will it has engendered. It seems as if while everyone is cheering her breakthrough performance, we’re supposed to act as if Sidibe isn’t obese and how her weight will limit the roles available to her.

I’m the last guy to bash anyone over their weight, but the fact is fat is funny to Hollywood producers. Would Eddie Murphy have a career anymore if he didn’t have his fat suit flicks (The Nutty Professor, Norbit) that cater to wringing cheap laughs from morbid obesity?

Only White guys get away with looking like beached whales in Hollywood. Jack Nicholson was a big star. Now he’s just big. Marlon Brando ate his way to mammoth proportions. Jack Black and Philip Seymour Hoffman are far from hard bodies. Women in Hollywood don’t have the luxury of packing on the pounds. Body image doesn’t always trump acting, but you just don’t find heavier females given the breaks a paunchy male gets to make movies.

Black actresses toil in a business obsessed with image, celebrates gaunt skeletal women with enormous boobs on rail-thin bodies. Good looks are not enough. Acting chops are not enough. Being in exactly the right place at the right time under the right set of circumstances won accolades and awards for Mo’Nique and Sidibe. It isn’t enough to sustain a career.

Halle Berry fits the movie industry’s superficial standard of beauty; light-skinned, acceptably thin, but still slinky enough to be sexy, alluring looks and a non-threatening persona. All that in Berry’s favor and she still can’t find decent scripts. Sidibe and Mo’Nique are a harder sell to white audiences. How do they get paired up with Brad Pitt or Will Smith in a movie? Answer: They don’t.

Sidibe says “People look at me and don’t expect much. I expect a lot.”

It’s great that Gabourey Sidibe is comfortable in her own skin. I’m skeptical fat acceptance extends to the production offices of Hollywood studios. Howard Stern was overly harsh in his assessment Sidibe’s career prospects are dim. He was also absolutely right.