Joaquin Phoenix delivered a passionate speech calling out systemic racism after winning the BAFTA award for his performance in Joker.
When Joker debuted at the Venice Film Festival, critics immediately pegged the DC film as a potential awards season contender and eyed Joaquin Phoenix as a favorite for Best Actor recognition. Now, those predictions are proving to be correct as awards season unfolds and Joquin Phoenix continues to earn accolades for his terrifying performance as the Joker.
Last night, Joaquin Phoenix added the BAFTA award to Best Actor in a Leading Role to his list of victories for Joker and delivered a passionate acceptance speech during which he called out the organization for its lack of diversity. While Joaquin Phoenix’s acknowledged that he is honored to have won for his performance in Joker, the actor admitted that he feels conflicted due to the exclusion of people of color among the 2019 BAFTA award nominees and in the film industry as a whole:
“I’ve not done everything I can to ensure that the sets that I work on are inclusive. But I think that it’s more than just having sets that are multicultural. We have to do the hard work to truly understand systemic racism. I think that it is the obligation of the people that have created and perpetuated and benefit from a system of oppression to be the ones that dismantle it, so that’s on us.”
You can check out Joaquin Phoenix’s full BAFTA award acceptance speech in the video below!
What do you think of Joaquin Phoenix’s BAFTA award acceptance speech? Do you like that Joaquin Phoenix has been using the platform given to him through his Joker wins to shine a light on important topics? Let us know in the comments section below!
Here is the official synopsis for Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker:
Director Todd Phillips “Joker” centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.
Directed by Todd Phillips from a script he co-wrote with Scott Silver, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais, and Shea Whigham.
Source: BAFTA
