The Oscars are my Super Bowl. Come February, when my peers are discussing passing yards and interceptions, I’m attempting to watch my way through a list of the year’s Oscar nominated films. But recently, that list has been defined by one blindingly obvious flaw: a lack of diversity.
The most coveted awards of the Oscars include the four different acting categories, Best Director and Best Picture. And in the past two years, the 20 actors nominated for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Actor in a Supporting Role or Best Actress in a Supporting Role have been all white. Meanwhile, films with Black actors, directors and/or producers that garnered critical and box-office success were snubbed by the Academy. This year, “Creed” (starring Michael B. Jordan and featuring Black director Ryan Coogler) and “Straight Outta Compton” (a film about a Black hip-hop group with a Black director and producer) were among the films ignored by the Academy. This follows the Academy’s blatant disregard for “Selma” and its director, Ava DuVernay, and its star, David Oyelowo, just last year.
Even though the lack of diversity in nominations may not be surprising considering 94 percent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is white, the Academy’s relative homogeneity in demographics is only a fraction of the factors resulting in this year’s “whiteout” of Oscar contenders. But Hollywood’s race problem is more than just about actors, directors and producers of color receiving proper recognition and winning awards. It extends far beyond the Academy – Hollywood and the entertainment industry as whole have a problem in how they understand, cast and portray race (read: casting a white man to play Michael Jackson is not okay).
According to a 2015 USC Annenberg study of the top 100 box office films each year from 2007 to 2014, minority characters made up roughly 30 percent of speaking roles, which roughly corresponds to the composition of the United States population. However, since this study simply accounted for speaking roles, a minority character having just a line or two of dialogue counted. Thus, according to a 2015 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report , there is a still greater underrepresentation of minority actors in leading roles by a factor of a little over two to one with just 16.7 percent of lead roles going to actors of color in 2013. Although this is a marked improvement from 2011, when minorities were leads in just 10.5 percent of films, it is still not enough. These pervasive imbalances affect not just Blacks but all minorities, especially Latinos, Asians and other nonwhites, and they need to be corrected.
Yet the viral Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, albeit true, is an oversimplification of the situation. Even a hashtag like #HollywoodSoWhite would not aptly characterize Hollywood’s race problem, because it’s not just an Oscars nomination problem and it’s not just Hollywood’s problem – the United States has a systemic race problem. The racism that movements like Black Lives Matter rightly protest is inherent in the way that American society perceives, understands and, ultimately, stereotypes racial groups. No American institution is free from racial prejudice and discrimination. It is evident in the numerous incidents of police brutality; it is evident in unemployment rates; it is evident in the judicial system; it is evident in pop culture and it is evident in Hollywood.
The Guardian’s 2015 analysis of lines spoken by people of color in recent successful films demonstrates Hollywood’s idea of the roles to which minorities can be relegated. Black men can be “rappers, bouncers, drug dealers, convicts, gang members, slaves or the normcore best friend”; black or Hispanic women can be “prostitutes, maids, strippers or dead bodies”; Asian women can be geishas, submissive wives or waitresses; Asian men can be socially inept nerds or martial arts masters and Middle Eastern men can be “terrorists or local peasants.”
Yes, there are numerically more actors of color on the screen. And yes, I’ll applaud the Academy’s Board of Governors’ historic decision to double the number of diverse members by 2020. But going forward, Hollywood needs to understand that it’s about more than just having that “token” ethnic character. Hollywood needs to reevaluate how people of color are being portrayed on the screen because right now, the majority of, if not all, characters of color are perpetuating and deepening the racial stereotypes that pervade our society.