Re: #OscarsSoWhite

1997oscarwinnersThe Academy Awards saluted all its living award winners in 1997. By the end of that ceremony, of the 140 trophies that had been handed out up to that point, Sidney Poitier, José Ferrer (not pictured), and Ben Kinglsey were the only non-white lead actors or actresses to have won.

The Oscars are not representative of the best film has to offer in a given year; they are not even representative of the best that American film has to offer in a given year. Good luck looking at any year’s picture or acting contests and not finding some decision that makes little sense now. As a arbiter of quality films and performances, the Academy Awards are a joke.

But as a television event, with meaningful impacts on our culture, there are few annual traditions that compare. An Oscar nomination can make a poorly performing film turn a profit; a filmmaker can parlay a nomination into a rich career with many chances to have his or her voice heard in mainstream cinema; and an actor or actress can use the moment in the spotlight to act as role models for others, find long and meaningful work in the industry, and expand the concept of what we as a country consider beautiful and talented. It’s in this realm that the recent Oscar shutout of people of color for the second straight year becomes worrisome.

In a year in which my choices for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were black (Samuel L. Jackson) and brown (Benicio Del Toro), it goes without saying that I take umbrage to their omissions as a matter of taste. But it’s much more distressing that a slew of very worthy possibilities from other actors who didn’t make my list went shorthanded. Why? Because my shortlist came from the point of view of a white male — a demographic that dominates the Academy voting — and whatever detours I might have taken (and there are many) can easily be pointed at as indications of different perspectives, be they from age, queerness or just film viewing quantity (my 500-films-a-year pace isn’t likely replicated too much by Academy voters, despite their supposed insight into film in any given year). Where I might have seen something overwhelming that I could relate to in the millennial ennui of Mommy or gay romance of Carol or obscure satisfactions of Li’l Quinquin, my worldview on many other works are likely heavily from the POV of a white man with a very specific sense of identity, culture, and history. I may want to keep pointing out those aforementioned POCs at the top of a couple of my acting categories, but a glance at the other 18 people in my acting lists gives you an array of 17 white faces and Idris Elba.

berry-washingtonSure, this once happened — 15 years ago

An Academy that is made up of people who look like each other and have very similar experiences is destined to lead to an under-appreciation for those works and performances that relate a POV that is very different from their own. Sure, there are the occasions when the voting body hands out a trophy to a minority but those cases are usually in the supporting categories where shrugging whims seem to take over voting every other year. Among the lead winners over Oscar history, the recent wins felt more like the Academy voters collectively going, “okay, it’s been awhile since Sidney Poitier so I guess we need to do this now” (Halle Berry and Denzel Washington, both in 2001) followed by two wins where black actors portrayed black real-life people that played as much into the big biographic personalities bias of the Academy rather than any ethnic bias. Among the two non-black, non-white winners for Best Actor, I have little read into José Ferrer winning 65 years ago but I’m not entirely sold that voters in 1982 didn’t think they were celebrating a white guy playing Gandhi.

And the impact of not seeing a single non-white face gleaming as the envelopes are opened for any of the major categories has reverberations in young people setting goals, casting agents choosing actors, and studios figuring who is bankable now. Michael B. Jordan is still set for a really great career, but without enough advocates within the Academy voter ranks to get him in a shortlist that likely should have included him (if I’m honestly just looking at mainstream, Oscar-y works, he should have had a much easier path to a nomination than four out of five of the men in my Best Actor list), but there’s no telling how different it might be had he been there on screen as a nominee alongside Academy Award winners Matt Damon and Eddie Redmayne, Emmy and Tony Award winner Bryan Cranston, and the night’s likely winner Leonardo DiCaprio.

When Viola Davis won an Emmy last year for Best Actress in a Drama Series, a first for a black actress, she said “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.” Though her speech brought some tone-deaf disagreement from the nattering nabobs, her statement belies the key reason #OscarsSoWhite could happen. In an industry that fills copious roles that could go to people of color with WASPs (including this year’s The Martian having Mackenzie Davis play a character who was Korean in the book1 or 2001’s A Beautiful Mind giving the role of John Nash’s Latina wife to Jennifer Connolly, a performance that scored her an Oscar, no less) and seems comfortable leaving predominately minority stories to the specialty and independent distributors, the problem is not with the Academy but in the industry they are supposed to celebrate. Hollywood should be producing more prestige pictures for a wider, more ethnically diverse audiences. You could write off Selma‘s surprising mere two nominations last year to a mismanaged awards campaign, but the bigger problem was the fact that it was the only centrally African American film with a realistic chance to do well with nominations in 2014.

oscarsYour 2016 Academy Board of Governors. That’s 50 white people plus PR Executive Cheryl Boone Isaacs and Cinematographer Daryn Okada.

Changes are afoot in the Academy voting thanks to an aggressive Band Aid affixed by the Academy president and board. This will supposedly have an impact on clearing out some of the older voters from the rolls2 and add new members to the Academy to inject a heavy dose of new perspective. Time will tell if this will have its intended impact, though any improvement upon the current state (wherein black and Hispanic voters each make up just 2% of Academy voters) is welcome.

Until then, the Academy will have to keep trying to convince us that this year isn’t that bad. That said, it’s not enough to say, “Hey, the Academy is looking younger and hipper this year” just because three nominations went to actors playing sexual and gender minorities and a hardcore action film is in the discussion for Best Picture and Best Director. That’s because this is still a club where those minority performances came from straight actors (Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Eddie Redmayne) and that action film was directed by a 70-year-old white man. Though George Miller is still younger than a large swath of the Academy3, that’s not quite the progress we’re looking for.

  1. An Indian character in The Martian novel was also switched over to a black character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, but at least that’s a diversity lateral move.
  2. We’re still trying to figure out how to make this happen ahead of our own 2016 presidential election.
  3. Average age of an Academy voter as of 2012: 63.