<Tr> <Td> Best Art Direction & Production Design </Td> <Td> Diane Lederman, Tim Galvin </Td> <Td> Nominated </Td> </Tr> <P> Regarding historical accuracy, Eliana Dockterman wrote in Time: "Allen was born on a Virginia plantation in 1919, not in Georgia...In the movie, Cecil Gaines grows up on a cotton field in Macon, where his family comes into conflict with the white farmers for whom they work . What befalls his parents on the cotton field was added for dramatic effect...Though tension between father and son over civil rights issues fuels most of the drama in the film, (Eugene Allen's son) Charles Allen was not the radical political activist that Gaines's son is in the movie ." </P> <P> Particular criticism has been directed at the film's accuracy in portraying President Ronald Reagan . While Alan Rickman's performance generated positive reviews, the director and screenwriters of the film have been criticized for depicting Reagan as indifferent to civil rights and his reluctance to associate with the White House's black employees during his presidency . According to Michael Reagan, the former president's son, "The real story of the White House butler doesn't imply racism at all . It's simply Hollywood liberals wanting to believe something about my father that was never there ." Paul Kengor, one of President Reagan's biographers, also attacked the film, saying, "I've talked to many White House staff, cooks, housekeepers, doctors, and Secret Service over the years . They are universal in their love of Ronald Reagan ." In regard to the president's initial opposition to sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, Kengor said, "Ronald Reagan was appalled by apartheid, but also wanted to ensure that if the apartheid regime collapsed in South Africa that it wasn't replaced by a Marxist - totalitarian regime allied with Moscow and Cuba that would take the South African people down the same road as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and, yes, Cuba . In the immediate years before Reagan became president, 11 countries from the Third World, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, went Communist . It was devastating . If the film refuses to deal with this issue with the necessary balance, it shouldn't deal with it at all ." </P> <P> Political commentator Ben Shapiro wrote: "There is no question that the film itself is full of historical inaccuracies . The Butler has virtually nothing in common with its source material, the life of White House butler Gene Allen, except for the fact that the main character of the film and Allen were both black butlers in the White House . The film's title character, Cecil Gaines, sees his father murdered and his mother raped by a white landowner; that never happened to Allen . The movie's title character has two children, one who goes to the Vietnam War, the other who becomes a Civil Rights pioneer; Allen actually had only one son ." </P>

Who plays ronald reagan in lee daniels the butler