The Front Row: “To Sleep with Anger”

At least as many movie greats have been ignored by the Academy’s voters as have been recognized, but there are bar bets to be won on the question of whether Danny Glover has ever been nominated for an Oscar. The answer is no, unfortunately, and in Charles Burnett’s 1990 film “To Sleep with Anger” Glover gives a performance for the ages that, apparently, wasn’t deemed good enough for the year. While we’re at it, neither the film itself nor Burnett—one of the leading directors of the last forty years—received official recognition within the industry, which gets to the very heart of the problem. Burnett has long been an independent filmmaker, and “To Sleep with Anger” was made outside the system. The Academy is the very distillation of the system. Therefore, many of the best movies made are hardly more likely to be considered for Oscars than for Tonys—the category is wrong.