Success Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s disappointment lands like a polite sentence with a serrated edge. On paper, it’s just a director backing an actor. In practice, it’s a pointed critique of an awards culture that likes its Black excellence legible, contained, and rarely confrontational. Denzel Washington’s work in The Hurricane isn’t merely charismatic; it’s accusatory. He plays Rubin Carter as a man crushed by a system that congratulates itself for being fair. That kind of performance doesn’t flatter the room handing out trophies.

The phrasing matters: “very disappointed” sounds genteel, almost Canadian in its restraint, but it signals something sharper than fandom. Jewison is naming a snub without saying “snub,” turning personal sentiment into a safe delivery system for institutional criticism. And when he adds “because I thought he deserved it,” he invokes the Academy’s own supposed metric - merit - while quietly suggesting that merit isn’t what decides outcomes. It’s a rhetorical trapdoor: if the work deserved it and didn’t win, what, exactly, is being rewarded?

Context does the rest. The Hurricane (1999) arrived in an era when “prestige” often meant narratives of suffering filtered through a palatable lens. Washington’s performance is too alive, too forceful, too unwilling to be an emblem. Jewison’s comment doubles as a defense of the film’s political temperature and a reminder that Hollywood’s biggest validations are also its most revealing evasions.