Every year around this time, people start arguing about the Oscars. There are always "snubbings" of actors, writers and films which people feel should have been nominated. But ever since the nominations for the 88th Annual Academy Awards were announced January 14, the lack of any minorities in the major acting categories has led to widespread criticism and controversy over the lack of diversity within the industry, and whether the ways it honors acting and film-making accolades is fair. If all of this sounds familiar, it is. This is the second year in a row people of color have been shut out at the Oscars, and it’s the second year in a row the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has been a trend in social media.
Just like the movies themselves, there's a difference between the fantasies we weave in our minds and the reality it’s based on. As much as conservatives rail against Hollywood as a bastion of liberalism, the truth is a bit more complex. As much as this town sees itself as progressive, the true power brokers of Hollywood are very male, very white, almost old enough to draw Social Security, and sometimes can't see their own biases and limitations. And while there have been some measures taken to correct some of the symptoms, the underlying dynamics of the awards process, the business model and the way social biases inform it, as well as the way decisions are made concerning casting films remain problems.
It seems the Oscar nominations might become an annual moment of bloodletting for the industry, with this year’s awards already being called “embarrassing,” the host of this year’s awards, Chris Rock, referring to the Oscars as “the white BET awards,” and both Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith announcing they will boycott the ceremony.
These are the Oscar nominations for the 2016 Academy Awards for Best Picture and the major acting categories:
As I mentioned above, there are arguments every year about who should have been nominated but suffered a snubbing. For example, many think Straight Outta Compton, Creed and Pixar’s Inside Out should have made it into the Best Picture category. Mad Max: Fury Road made it into the Best Picture nominees but Charlize Theron was left out of the Best Actress category. While Jennifer Jason Leigh got a nod for her performance in The Hateful Eight, the film didn’t get one and Quentin Tarantino was not nominated for Best Original Screenplay or Best Director. Creed director Ryan Coogler was also among the directors who didn’t make the cut. And Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan were not nominated in the Best Actor category for critically praised performances in Beasts of No Nation and Creed.
But above all the discussions of snubs, the failure of any people of color to get an acting or directing nod has been the most contentious issue to come out of these nominations.
From Mike Hogan at Vanity Fair:
In a year with extraordinary performances by Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson (Creed), Idris Elba and Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation), Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina), Will Smith and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Concussion), Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor (Tangerine), Benicio Del Toro (Sicario), and the ensemble cast of Straight Outta Compton, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated an entirely white slate of actors, actresses, supporting actors, and supporting actresses. Even the writers of the hip-hop drama Straight Outta Compton, nominated for best original screenplay, are all caucasian. And the only person nominated from Creed, a film by a black writer-director featuring a black leading man, is white supporting actor Sylvester Stallone.
In 2015, Broadway Black managing editor April Reign created the #OscarSoWhite hashtag to bring attention to the Academy’s tendency to overlook performances and achievements by non-white actors, directors, screenwriters, and beyond. Last year’s all-white slate of acting nominations felt like a setback, as did the fact that Selma’s Ava DuVernay was snubbed in the category of best director despite her film’s 99 percent fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating, $66.8 million haul at the box office, and best-picture nomination. (It went on to win the Oscar for best song.) DuVernay would have been the first African-American woman ever to be nominated for best director.
In its 87-year history, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded Oscars to just 14 African American actors. (Denzel Washington won twice, naturally.) The first black actor to win an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel, for her role as a slave in 1939’s Gone With the Wind. The most recent black actor to win is Lupita Nyong’o in 2013’s 12 Years a Slave. She played a slave, too. Only one Latino actor has ever won best actor, and no Latina actress has ever won best actress.
A big problem with the way the Academy has dealt with the issues of race, sex, and diversity is that voters approach it through tokenism and the idea of giving someone or some group “their due” and then moving on. It’s the same sort of mentality which was present among some parts of the white population after President Obama’s victory in 2008, where having elected a black president was taken as proof race relations in the United States had been solved for all time. The Oscar voters tend to do this with recognizing a person’s career over the individual nominated performance, voting for a film because it distinguishes a worthy cause and brings attention to a social ill, and checking off the boxes of each minority group because it’s “their time.” So the Academy will pat itself on the back after honoring Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, or 12 Years a Slave, but in the years since then reverts to normal patterns because they’ve checked off those boxes. And the industry gets to point to those individual award winners as proof of how there’s not a problem.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the current and first African-American president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has stated she is “frustrated” by the lack of diversity and with regard to the measures to correct they need to “speed it up.” However, in the past, Isaacs has also argued there are so many good movies and performances some are bound to be left out when it comes to awarding excellence.
There are more than 6,000 voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The rules for membership are a bit convoluted, but it basically consists of people working in the industry who are either sponsored by two Academy members, or by those who've been nominated or won Academy Awards. The demographics of the Academy are not public knowledge, and the organization refuses to release any data about its members. But 2012 and 2013 analyses by the Los Angeles Times found the demographics to be about what you would expect if one attended a tea party meeting.
- 94 percent white
- 76 percent male
- An average age of 63 years old
- Of the Academy’s different branches, the producers are 98 percent white, the writers are 98 percent white, and the actors are 88 percent white
From Elahe Izadi at the Washington Post:
The Times analysis found that there was even a nun among the voting ranks.
In an effort to make the voting membership less white and less male, the Academy has broadened its pool of invitees. After averaging 133 new members a year, the Academy doubled its invitations in 2014. And last June, 322 people were invited, representing a group more diverse than usual. Isaacs said at the time it was a move toward “a normalization of our membership to represent both the industry and the country as a whole.”
Of the 25 actors invited in that 2015, 17 were white. Three invitees were black: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (“Beyond the Lights”), Kevin Hart (“The Wedding Ringer”) and David Oyelowo (“Selma”).
But because membership is for life, it may be a long while until any major demographic changes take hold.
So, given the Academy membership requirements and the demographics of who works in the industry, is it really that surprising the Academy's voting blocs are made up of mostly old white men? Here are some other interesting stats about the film industry and diversity:
- According to research done by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, only 17 percent of workers behind the camera on films were women in 2014.
- The same research found only 7 percent of films in 2014 were directed by women.
- The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism noted that of the 100 top-grossing films in 2013, comprising 107 director credits, only seven of those directors were black.
- The pay gap between men and women is also very present in Hollywood. After the release of Sony’s hacked emails, it was noticed that among the 6,000 employees at the company, 17 make $1 million or more per year. Only one of them is a woman, with Michael De Luca and Hannah Minghella having the same job and titles as co-presidents of production at Columbia Pictures. However, De Luca is paid significantly more money. Also, it was revealed how this factors into actor compensation. For example, the actors and director of American Hustle, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and David O. Russell, receive 2 percent more back-end profits than Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, the film’s two female leads.
- The hacking of Sony and the leak of their internal emails not only revealed pay disparities but also discussions about how race should affect casting. In one email, an unnamed producer wrote to Sony co-chair Michael Lynton warning that casting black actors for lead roles, such as Denzel Washington in The Equalizer, limits the amount of revenue a film can generate worldwide.
From Jackie Strauss at The Hollywood Reporter:
Straight Outta Compton executive producer Will Packer is chiming in on the #OscarsSoWhite discussion. In a lengthy post on his Facebook page Friday, Packer called out the lack of diversity among the 88th Academy Award nominees, which were announced Thursday.
"To my #OscarsSoWhite folks who are angry at the absurd lack of diversity highlighted yet again by this year's Oscar noms. Trust me, I get it," he wrote in reference to black actors and movies focused on black stories being snubbed for the second year in a row.
Packer congratulated all of the nominees, including Compton screenwriters Jon Herman and Andrea Berloff (the film earned a best screenplay nom), but said he really wanted to applaud those who were left off the list. Beast of No Nation's Idris Elba, Creed's Michael B. Jordan,Concussion's Will Smith and Star Wars' John Boyega all got a mention. Noting that the lack of diversity calls the show's legitimacy into question, Packer called on the Academy to do "better": "To my Academy colleagues, WE HAVE TO DO BETTER [sic]. Period. The reason the rest of the world looks at us like we have no clue is because in 2016 it's a complete embarrassment to say that the heights of cinematic achievement have only been reached by white people. I repeat—it's embarrassing."
Over the weekend, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Will Smith who was considered a possible nominee for his role in Concussion, first floated the idea of a boycott of the Academy Awards before announcing today in a video posted to Facebook she will indeed not attend the ceremony. This news came around the same time director Spike Lee, who received an honorary Oscar last November at the Governors Awards, revealed on Instagram he will not be going either.
From Jodi Gugliemi at People:
Lee penned a thoughtful message on Instagram in which he revealed that because of the lack on diversity for the second consecutive year, he and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, will not be attending the 2016 ceremony.
"#OscarsSoWhite... Again," he wrote. "We cannot support it and mean no disrespect to my friends, host Chris Rock and producer Reggie Hudlin, president Isaacs and the Academy. But, how is it possible for the 2nd consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are white?"
Lee accompanied his statement with a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., writing that it was "no coincidence" that his post falls on the national holiday celebrating the civil rights leader.
"Dr. King said 'There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it's right,' " he wrote. "For too many years when the Oscars nominations are revealed, my office phone rings off the hook with the media asking me my opinion about the lack of African-Americans and this year was no different." But despite the controversy, Lee said the "real battle" is not with the Academy, but with the "executive office of the Hollywood studios and TV and cable networks," where it is decided which projects get made.