Progress For Diversity: Oscars

By Drew Lederman

Last years Oscar nominations made waves with their abundance of lily-white
nominees, garnering so much backlash and embarrassment that the hashtag
#OscarsSoWhite went viral. For the second year in a row, the Academy nominated zero
people of color, despite the hope that the Academy's black president, Cheryl Boone
Isaacs, would push for diversity.
Just one year ago, the Academy had around 6,000 members, of which three out
of four were men and nine out of 10 were white. These statistics do not accurately
represent the movie-frequenting population minorities having accounted for over half of
ticket sales in 2016.
Boone Isaacs worked to promote inclusion in this upcoming awards season by
reducing Academy membership from lifelong to 10 years, suspending voting rights for
members not currently working on a project and adding 638 new members. You can
guess they are a far more diverse bunch.
These changes came into effect and proved fruitful this year at the 89th Academy
Awards, where diversity is finally getting more recognition with minorities representing 7
out of 20 performance nominees. Additionally, four of the nine best film nominees tell
stories featuring minorities. These films are covering ground by leaps and bounds, with
Hidden Figures intersecting black rights and feminism and Moonlight intersecting black
and LGBTQIA communities.
Seizing this opportunity to showcase #BlackExellence and #MinorityExcellence
has never been more pressing than in our current political climate, U.S. congressmen
Steve King recently questioning whether or not non-white subgroups" are contributing
to our society.
Although the Oscars made progress this year, groups remain that are
underrepresented and nearly invisible on the list of nominations: Asians, Latinx, and
LGBTQIA. It is 2017 and there are no Latinx actors, directors, or films nominated. As for
Asian nominations, Lion is a singular beacon shining through the absence on the silver
screen of the largest ethnicity in the world. The same can be said for Moonlight and
LGBTQIA.
The Oscars are not the only guilty party, rather all of Hollywood can shoulder the
blame. According to a study done by USC's Annenberg School for Communication and
Journalism, only 28.3% of actors with speaking roles in the movies assessed by the
study were non-white, 2% were LGBTQIA, and 37.1% were female.
None of these statistics are representative of the enormously diverse world we
live in today, nor do they further the 21st century ideal of equal opportunity. Oppositely,
they perpetuate the ideals of Trumps America, which is a detriment to the art world.
While the Oscars may be more diverse this year, that only stands against its
white washed past for comparison. The Oscars and Hollywood as a whole still have a
long journey ahead before they can call themselves representative of a beautifully
diverse population.