This year’s theme may have been “Heroes in Hollywood,” whatever that means. But the narrative that formed around many of the night’s winners and their award campaigns was the film industry’s progress and diversity. Of course, this is not a new story either. It’s a narrative to which many would ask: progress for whom and diversity for what purpose? In 2006, George Clooney caught flak for toasting Hollywood’s liberalism during his Supporting Actor acceptance speech for Syriana. At the same ceremony, Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture to Crash. In addition, Paul Haggis’ film’s divisive win served as a misguided corrective to the unfortunate legacy of the 62^nd Academy Awards, which honored Driving Miss Daisy with Best Picture while denying a nomination for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. It’s a history which made me worry that 12 Years producer Brad Pitt was going to speak for the production as its predominantly black cast and crew took to the stage.

There is some credence to the Academy’s efforts to diversify who and what it chose to recognize. In addition to Cuarón, Sunday’s ceremony honored Robert Lopez and his wife and collaborator Kristen Anderson-Lopez with Best Song, for “Let It Go” from Frozen. The award also secured Lopez’s status as the youngest EGOT recipient, at 39. It also beat out Pharrell’s “Happy” from Despicable Me 2, though I’m confident that the producer will launch a successful EGOT campaign in time (I’d sign off on a Neptunes’ jukebox musical). The ceremony’s queer presence is still notable. Though I disagree with Dallas Buyers Club’s heteromasculine representation of the early phase of the AIDS epidemic, DeGeneres’ rocking multiple glittering tuxedos and serving penis jokes at Jonah Hill’s expense is still an exception on primetime network television.

Even though the screenplay was written by a white man, Spike Jonze’s Her advances fascinating ideas (and conversation) about gender, technology, and labor in a contemporary moment. Similar issues about the voice as a technology of gender and a site for labor come up in Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet From Stardom, a film about the professional contributions and legacies of predominantly African American female back-up singers. It won for Best Documentary Feature. It also resulted in my favorite musical performance, Darlene Love’s impromptu a cappella performance of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Finally, we cannot ignore that all of this activity is occurring under the leadership of Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first black woman to serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

A pervasive attitude of many Oscar ceremonies was that certain films and talent should be given their due. This year, it was time to honor a film directed by a black British filmmaker and written by an African American screenwriter that boldly rewrites Hollywood slave narratives by eschewing an easy moralism that flatters white viewers. It was time to reward veteran actors and newcomers who represent marginalized identity groups and gave unforgettable performances. In this regard, many believed it was time for 12 Years to win, which it did for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress, for newcomer Lupita N’yongo’s cinematic debut.

N’yongo is a star. She is a sensitive, intelligent performer who has brought the same thoughtfulness and humanity to her Oscar and Essence Award acceptance speeches that she gave to her character, Patsey. She has the self-possession necessary to pull off intricate couture and a variety of hairstyles for her politically short hair. She has a sense for how the film industry operates, skills she acquired from her studies at the Yale Drama School, as well as her experience as a production assistant. She brings a sense of wonder and purposefulness to collaboration, which allows her work with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Alfre Woodard, and Sarah Paulson to resonate and her perceptive comments and questions during The Hollywood Reporter’s actress roundtable to leave such an impression. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I hope Hollywood recognizes that N’yongo is a star too. Giving her this award is a start. But women still struggle in an industry that doesn’t consistently create and finance films centered on complex female characters. This is a condition that Cate Blanchett challenged in her acceptance speech for Best Actress. Historically, the film industry gives even fewer opportunities to women of color. N’yongo followed 12 Years with Non-Stop, a thriller about a plane hijacking starring Liam Neeson. N’yongo plays a flight attendant with Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery. But I don’t want to just see N’yongo play flight attendants. I also don’t want to see her or her peers limited to exploring themes of subjugation and oppression from nations’ racist histories. I want Hollywood to explore the full range of her talents. If I were pitching projects, I’d rouse Steven Soderbergh from retirement to build an international spy caper around her with romantic intrigue, double agents, and sleek designer wear. I also want to know if she can switch between popcorn fare and Indiewood with the ease of someone Amy Adams, an actor unbound by genre or director who is overdue for her own statuette. Can N’yongo star in Her or a Muppet movie? I want to find out. I hope the film industry and the Academy do too.

By refusing to name Jackie Robinson, Cecil Gaines, or Solomon Northrop, these films do more to serve broader narratives about an alleged post-racial America. Rather, these stories, filled with suffering, noble Negroes, ultimately are less concerned with these black lives (after all, they are nameless as far as the titles are concerned). They fit a cinematic post-racial narrative that suggests that most of America’s racial problems are in the mythic past.

While these narratives follow Black characters, they are not primarily invested in telling the stories of Jackie Robinson, Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines, or Solomon Northrop. Instead black men function as props in their own tales, which ultimately aim to “teach” liberal white viewers about the “horrors” of slavery and pre-1965 life in America from within the safe confines of their nearest Cineplex; the conclusion of each film provides a neat way to close the door on those histories. Jackie Robinson goes on to integrate baseball and in 1997, his jersey number, 42, was retired across Major League Baseball. Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines finally gets the White House Head of Staff promotion he deserves and meets President Barack Obama to close the post-racial loop, demonstrating that if black people just “go slow” they will get the rights they want (and implicitly deserve). Lastly, as the film’s narrative ends, Solomon Northrop is reunited with his family, implicitly suggesting that his wrongful enslavement had been righted (although that was not a typical outcome for many free black men and women who were wrongfully re-enslaved). Ultimately, these films are more concerned with providing satisfying narrative closure than showing the things that were as narratively neat in these men’s lives – like Solomon Northrop’s inability to sue the men responsible for his re-enslavement.

Ultimately, 42, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler are biopics centered on black men’s lives. However, two other biopics released this year help to illuminate the point I am making, Captain Phillips and Philomena. Captain Phillips is centered on Richard Phillips triumph over Somali bodies (whose bodies stand in for blackness) and Philomena focuses on the titular character’s search for the child taken away from her. While there is some cultural understanding of Captain Richard Phillips, there is little cultural knowledge about Philomena Lee. Nevertheless, we understand that we are specifically seeing Captain Richard Phillips’ story. This is Philomena Lee’s story. We understand the centrality of these particular white people’s stories because of our cultural rootedness in the notion that whiteness is multiplicitous while blackness is monolithic.

By excluding the names of Robinson, Allen/Gaines, and Northrop in the film’s titles, these films remove the personal suffering of these men and instead focus on the lessons to be learned. These nameless black bodies then, stand in for a broader black experience that reifies the monolithic cultural understanding of cinematic blackness.

This failure to name these particular black men within the titles of these quality films with black casts (and this argument can be extended to The Help), suggests the utility of the representational labor black bodies are called on to cinematically perform. These films, with their inanimately named titular subjects also stand in for blackness on the world stage. Unlike most films with primarily black casts (and those not deemed “quality” because they are not centered on black suffering) like Baggage Claim or any of the films within the Tyler Perry oeuvre, they are largely segregated into US markets whereas more than a quarter of The Butler’s overall gross was derived from international markets. In this way, the namelessness of the black bodies travels its inanimate self to worldwide markets.

Ultimately then, 42, The Butler, and 12 Years A Slave concomitantly participate in and reify the notion of the nobly suffering negro while also suggesting the relative lack of importance in naming black bodies in film titles. While the titles certainly gesture toward the subject matter of the film, the legacies of the individual stories of Jackie Robinson, Eugene Allen/Cecil Gaines, and Solomon Northrop get lost in translation. Instead, viewers are invited to take the “lessons” of these suffering black bodies and find comfort in the ways black people in American “have overcome,” while allowing the myth of post-racial America to strengthen its roots.

12 Years a Slave is a groundbreaking cinematic adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative written by Solomon Northrup, and memorably acted by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British born actor of Nigerian ancestry. It is the first slave narrative to be filmed. It is also the first film about slavery in America to be written and directed by artists of African heritage—McQueen is British-born and of Jamaica ancestry and writer John Ridley is an African-American born in Wisconsin. It is not the first to expose the savage treatment inflicted on slaves imprisoned by the plantation system, but it may be the first to convey it from the point of view of the slaves rather than that of a sympathetic Caucasian observer. It appears at a felicitous moment, when it is most needed to remind us all what it means for the wealth of the highest social class to be derived from the oppression of another segment of the population.

At the outset, Northrup is a free man, a citizen accepted and valued. Despite the indisputable fact of the plight of other African-Americans in his time, his confidence in his own security as an American makes him trusting enough to believe that a pair of men who line their pockets by drugging free black men for southern slave markets are genuine when they wine and dine him under the guise of offering him professional advancement. McQueen likens him to Pinocchio being seduced by the promise of a life of glamour by the evil slavers in that story. Make no mistake, 12 Years a Slave is about a remarkable man, his ordeal (adapted from Northrup’s memoir), and the courage and intelligence he summoned in order to survive the vicious institutions of a racist nation. But collaterally, it also reflects the blindness of individuals to the big picture.

Black and white, northern and southern, all people are but pieces of the larger pattern of the toxic slave “industry,” which rules them despite their individual intentions and situations. The scarred bodies of the black slaves and their enforced separation from their loved ones display most blatantly the tenor of the times. But slavery also takes a toll on its purported beneficiaries. The best, “Master” Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), lives caught between his sympathies for a persecuted people and his terror that acting on such feelings might threaten his own position as a plantation owner. The worst, “Master” Epps (Michael Fassbender), wallows in the culture of domination at the price of his being as a man, only able to express sexuality and brotherly camaraderie with his slaves. The northern abolitionists hold their breath as they arrive to rescue Solomon, after an equally frightened itinerant Canadian carpenter, named Bass (Brad Pitt), alerts them to Solomon’s plight. The plantation system is a confirmation of the interdependence of all and the disaster for everyone of a legal mandate to tyrannize a specific subgroup.

The Northeastern states, though clearly imperfect, shine in 12 Years a Slave as the Promised Land. But one of the many interesting mysteries of the film is that, because we spend roughly ninety percent of the time in plantation hell, “free” New York state also glitters like a dream floating atop a possibly more innate reality of pernicious greed. Solomon’s escape, leaving thousands still in bondage, feels like a cancer in remission that might recur unexpectedly. The most astonishing individual courage can never neutralize the acid of an unjust society, and that may be the most painful truth McQueen has to offer.

In All is Lost, another individual wakens from a dream of self-determination. The film is an ocean-voyaging American “divina comedia,” and a rebuttal of The Old Man and the Sea, a book that further elaborates on Hemingway’s bedazzled admiration for macho grace under pressure. In this film, hell, purgatory, and heaven are one and the protagonist’s confrontation with the ocean is a lesson about the perils of macho worship of elite, white American privilege and can be seen as an intriguing and contrasting companion piece to 12 Years a Slave. The film features only one character, identified as “our man” (Robert Redford). Fit and intrepid, he has the time, money, and inclination to intentionally isolate himself, and sail the largely uncharted Indian Ocean alone. “Our man’s” idyllic leisure, however, soon becomes as oppressive to him as Northrup’s abduction and evokes a different pervasive cultural infection.

The film begins like Dante’s epic with “our man” stating in voiceover that he has lost his way. It ends, like The Divine Comedy, with an image of salvation. In between, “our man” fights the ocean encroaching on his yacht, damaged by the flotsam from the wreck of a commercial cargo ship. He is a paragon of individual fortitude, Thoreau’s ideal individualist, a John Wayne of determination. But unlike in the American literature of self-reliance, this is not enough. Once “our man” is cut off from others, hope rests only in the re-establishment of connection. McQueen’s vision of the tragic cultural invention of a black slave population is complemented by Chandor’s image of the grandiose cultural fantasy of a naturally heroic white elite. American hubris abounds.

In the fourth and final installment, we watch NYFF take on love, and perhaps shed some light at the end of the tunnel.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.