So, I saw the new House Party film last weekend.

The feature film debut of music video director Charles Calmatic Kidd II, the remake of the beloved 1990 classic isinteresting. The hook: Two 20-something, struggling professional cleaners-slash-party promoters (Jacob Latimore and Tosin Cole) need to come up on some quick cash, lest their lives fall apart. After cleaning LeBron James Los Angeles home, they decide to throw a, well, house party there while James is out of town on a retreat.

The mere conceit of executing a celebrity-laden party in the home of the NBAs biggest star (who produced the film with Maverick Carter) without him, the police or anyone else who matters being alerted in advance is preposterous but thats probably the point. Suspension of disbelief makes the film work.

House Party currently sits at 32% on the film critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with no shortage of scathing reviews. Katie Walsh at the Los Angeles Times wrote : This comedically and narratively muddled take on the title (not even the original premise) is deeply unfunny and downright tiresome. The Guardians Andrew Lawrence wrote in his one-star review: Jamess heart and hangups might be in the right place. But unless youve got nothing else going this weekend, his House Party is one to skip.

The original film has cult classic status, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry last year. The remake is not as good as the original, but its still fun enough to not merit a one-star review. Its perfectly serviceable entertainment, much like the original was when we watched it for the first time three decades ago. Id defy any middle-aged Black person who appreciated the first film to find zero enjoyment in the music, the callbacks to the original or the celebrity cameos, which are so numerous Im sure I missed a few.

At the risk of reducing Black folks to the monolith (I know we arent), well always have a different context of cultural appreciation toward material created for us, by us, as I imagine is the case with every underrepresented minority group. I believe thats represented in some of the non-Black (and especially white) critics blasting House Party with poor reviews.

As it stands, most professional media critics are non-Black. According to Zippia , a website that tracks these numbers, some 71.3% of film critics are white and just 5.3% are African American. The disparity is so vast and the culture differences are so stark that Gil Robertson co-founded The African American Film Critics Association just to give Black film excellence the flowers that the Academy Awards never seem to recognize.

When I read certain reviews of Black media, I often wonder how influenced they are by their inherent separation from Black culture, and how much of an impact that has on their final reviews. I call it the Seinfeld Paradox: Comparing highly beloved yet incredibly white content to anything with even a tincture of ethnic culture.

If a non-Black television critic compares the humor of, say, HBOs South Side which might be the funniest and Blackest show on television right now to the unrepentantly alabaster Emily in Paris, methinks something gets lost in translation. Do I believe Insecure had excellent seasons and seasons that didnt quite work? Yeah, but I dont want a 700-word critical analysis of the show from a white critic born and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Would your average non-Black critic ever deduce, as I did, that Nicco Annans Uncle Clifford from P-Valley was the best character in all of television in 2022? Probably not, and thats just fine, but I recognize that were not bringing the same cultural context to our deductions.

I recognize that the Power universe doesnt exist in the pantheon of universally beloved television shows like The Wire or The Sopranos. But Black folks watch more television than other ethnic groups , and we made those shows ultra-popular because the characters connect with us in a way that the token Black characters written by white writers on network television do not.

If you need any truly definitive proof of what I write, know that The Last Dragon sits at a meager 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, while every Black person between 35 and 65 knows that film is the single greatest creation in the history of all creation.

Theres also a subtle racist undertone to some of these reviews, as we saw with the recent Will Smith drama Emancipation. Problems with that film are manifold: cloying Oscar bait, Smiths ridiculous accent, and that its the 5,028,482nd slave narrative film that no one asked for.

But its almost impossible to read a review of Emancipation that doesnt mention Smiths almost year-old assault on Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. I absolutely believe Smith was out-of-pocket and that the penalty the Academy meted out is just. But white critics using the attack in the context of a negative review (and putting it in the headline ) feels more insidious than just a condemnation of the film.

It all underlines a larger issue regarding how Hollywood in general applies its lens toward the critiques and professional awards of Black content. If film and television awards committees have shown us anything, its masturbatory, Damien Chazelle-directed paeans to old (read: white) Hollywood like La La Land which famously lost Best Picture to Moonlight in the 2017 Academy Awards ceremony in what was the most shocking Oscars moment before last March that really get their blood pumping.

In recent years, theres been a social media-driven push to acknowledge this discrepancy, with April Reigns #OscarsSoWhite borne from the fact that there were zero non-white actor nominees in the 2015 Oscars. Eight years later and things havent improved much: The Woman King and Till, two Black woman-directed-and-starring films, were both snubbed for the 2023 Oscars, renewing calls that the Oscars are, indeed, still so white. For contrast, The African American Film Critics Association acknowledged Gina Prince-Bythewood the associations Best Director award for her work with The Woman King, which also won Best Picture.

This issue tends to persist across multiple awards ceremonies, as Jerrod Carmichael so hilariously (and uncomfortably) reminded everyone when he took the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to task as host of the 2023 Golden Globes ceremony earlier this month.

The Powers That Be tried to make it up to us before, lest we forget the 2002 Oscars when Denzel Washington won the Best Actor award for Training Day and Sidney Poitier received an honorary Oscar. I remember it feeling like a capitulation of sorts to give Washington the big award for a decent role in a decent film considering one of the biggest travesties in the ceremonys 94-year history is not awarding Washington the Best Actor Oscar in 1993 for Spike Lees Malcolm X.

Speaking of Malcolm X, for Black stories to get accolades and rave reviews from white critics and awards committees, there seems to be an unspoken requirement that the story has a connection to antebellum slavery, the Jim Crow South, or some other sympathy-inducing socioeconomic hardship that comes with being Black on planet Earth.

Many argue that these stories are necessary for non-Black people to understand what we have historically endured and continue to, but many actual Black people are over the glut of this material though Im sure its a fine film, its why I refuse to watch Till. Sideways is one of my favorite films of all time and was justly nominated for a bunch of awardsbut its just a story of two white dudes white dude-ing. No deep trauma, wild tragedies or white saviors. Why cant we have more awards-caliber films with Black folks justexisting?

Every now and again, it feels as if some of these Black prestige films are nabbing the White Guilt Award in the form of a small metal statuette. Green Book isnt a terrible film despite the negative response many Black folks had to it. But I believe it cleaned up during awards season because theres no greater ambrosia for white folks than a true-ish tale of a hard-edged white dude becoming unlikely pals with a queer Black man in the Jim Crow South.

I dont have a ready-made solution to any of this. I believe every awards committee can benefit from ethnic and gender diversity, but I stop short at the idea that, say, only a person of Hispanic descent should be allowed to professionally review Encanto. But when it comes to determining what Black-created, Black-casted material Ill consume, Ill consult Black Twitter or my own Facebook feed before Rotten Tomatoes.

And even if we dont give a film or television show love, I might pay to support it anyway, because Im rooting for (almost ) everybody Black.