I’m not seeing nearly that many; got a cite for your count?
I haven’t watched the Oscars in 25 years and I’d be hard pressed to name a lot of the winners. Ain’t gonna watch it this year.
But a heavily liberal community is actually racist and geared to old fogies? I am shocked, simply shocked.
In answer to an earlier question - there were a number of non-white actors that gave performances worthy of award consideration that were mentioned in the article I referenced in my original post.
Oh for God’s sake, let’s just multiply the number of Oscars, award an Oscar to each ethnicity and have done with it.
Yes, the question annoys me, because if people think it is important, they either think that the Oscars themselves are important, which is silly, or think that I think the Oscars are important, which is insulting. Oscar winnings will not change my evaluation of how the different groups in America are respected one way or another. I will not think that non-white people are mistreated due to lack or representation, nor will I as a white male point to hypothetical huge number of non-white people who are nominated and say “look, racism’s over!”
Amen, Ludovic. I’m annoyed because people think awards shows mean a damn thing.
In all honesty, is that what you would say if you were an actor, especially one who wasn’t even yet A-list, who suddenly won an Oscar? Really? You would say that?
I think we need to separate the question of the merit and objectivity of Oscar awards from the indisputable impact they have on film revenues and the prestige and earning potential of the subjects affected. If you want to argue that the criteria on which Oscar nominations and awards are based are all bullshit, then argue away. But to suggest that they don’t “mean a damn thing” is just reality-denial.
I don’t think there’s any meaningful way to evaluate if the Oscars are racist without more data.
Namely, how many motion pictures were released that the academy considered in 2015? How many of the lead actors were white, how many were black? How many of the supporting actors were white, how many were black?
The black population is usually listed around 13%. If we assume blacks are “slightly underrepresented” in movies, let’s say 10% of the actors considered were black. There are only 20 slots available (5 for each sex at lead, and 5 for each at supporting), given that it seems pretty easy that non-racist reasons could exclude all the actors from a small 10% minority.
Additionally, the Academy is intended to be merit based on the collective subjective view of the films and the quality of the acting performances. With that being the case, we’d need some objective way to measure film quality. I’d say you’d have to get each film and its associated metacritic rating (metacritic aggregates many different review sources), and then you can start doing some analysis to see the number of actors of each race weighted to quality of films they were in, and determine if a race is underrepresented relative to its prevalence in quality films.
I recently watched Bridge of Spies, it had a pretty big cast as you can see here, a lot of people only on screen briefly, extras in busy city scenes and etc, courtroom scenes things of that nature. So it’s not Hateful 8 with only a very small cast (and essentially no extras.)
I don’t remember a single black face in the movie. Now, on imdb I see no obvious black actors on the list–if any of them are black, then they are actors who do not have a headshot on imdb (none of the photos of actors are black that I saw.) While some of this is explainable–in New York City in the early 60s blacks wouldn’t be present say, in the NYPD in large number, on the payroll at a major New York law firm, in the CIA, and certainly not in East Berlin where a large segment of the film is set. That being said, you probably could’ve had a black extra or two in the courtroom scenes or briefly in the city scenes in New York–and maybe there was. But importantly there are no black actors with significant speaking parts, and you don’t win Oscars for being an extra.
I saw Mad Max in 2015 as well. It stars a white man and white woman, the villain is white, almost all of his army/followers are white. He has a black sex slave/white, but only one of 5-6 wives. She may be the only visibly black character in the whole film.
The Martian is another movie I saw in 2015 (I’m listing best picture movies), the lead is white. The weight of the speaking roles are white, with Chiwetel Eljiofor and Donald Glover being the only two black characters with notable speaking parts. Donald Glover’s role is important in the story, but a relatively small one in screen time, and thus unlikely to receive academy nominations. Eljiofor’s role is much bigger, and he does a good job at it, but again–he’s one of about 10 important non-Matt Damon characters. (I’ve also read the book, and I’d argue his character is more prominent in the book. Characters we don’t see as much in the book like the rest of the spaceship crew get more screen time and etc.) FWIW also, neither of these parts were black in the book, Eljiofor’s character was Indian and Glover’s was white.
So just from a small selection of the movies that made best picture (the only ones I’ve seen yet), there are very few black roles, no black leads, and several of the black characters that have speaking parts are in small parts.
Lead Oscar acting nominations only go to you for being a lead, if you’re not the lead you have no chance at that. Supporting actor noms can theoretically go to anyone, but they tend to go to significant supporting actors, not ones with very minimal screen time. So at least in a very small, unscientific selection of best picture nominees, we have very few black actors in roles positioned to get Oscar consideration.
But to go back to my original point, we need a lot more data to know if the Academy is ignoring, disproportionately, black actors, or if there are just less black actors than there “should be” relative to society. Not everything is done in racially balanced numbers. For example at one point there were no blacks in Major League Baseball because they were outright banned. When the color barrier was broken, there was a major upsurge in black ballplayers. By the mid-70s their percentage in MLB had peaked at about 20%–higher than their percentage of the general population. But it then began a steady decline, now it’s around 8.5%, a good bit lower than the 13% of the population that is black.
Without getting into the reasons, some things are done disproportionate to a race’s share of society. Is acting in film one of those things? If so, why? Is it because of discrimination against aspiring black actors? Or some other reason? (Most people don’t think baseball has fewer blacks because of discrimination, MLB is certainly less discriminatory towards blacks than it was in the past. The common wisdom is as the sport has become less popular relative to football it’s lost a swathe of potential players to football, and as baseball essentially died out as a ‘neighborhood game’ in urban areas and was replaced by basketball that removed a lot of the traditional areas that generate black players, this is then combined with the ever increasing number of players drafted from Latin America and you’re seeing a downward move of black players in MLB.)
You bet your ass. If I was nominated for a Grammy, if I showed up, it’d be because I didn’t want to be rude.
Best Actor:
2001 Denzel Washington (winner)
2001 Will Smith
2004 Jamie Foxx (winner)
2004 Don Cheadle
2005 Terrence Howard
2006 Forest Whitaker (winner)
2006 Will Smith
2009 Morgan Freeman
2012 Denzel Washington
2012 Chiwetel Ejiofor
Best Actress:
2001 Halle Berry (winner)
2009 Gabourey Sidibe
2011 Viola Davis
2012 Quvenzhané Wallis
Supporting Actor:
2003 Djimon Hounsou
2004 Morgan Freeman (winner)
2004 Jamie Foxx
2006 Djimon Hounsou
2006 Eddie Murphy
2013 Barkhad Abdi
Supporting Actress:
2002 Queen Latifah
2004 Sophie Okonedo
2006 Jennifer Hudson (winner)
2007 Ruby Dee
2008 Viola Davis
2008 Taraji P. Henson
2009 Mo’Nique (winner)
2011 Octavia Spencer (winner)
2013 Lupita Nyong’o (winner)
Which is 9.67% (29 out of 300)
And I missed the edit window, but my band mates have actually been nominated for awards. In that case, I went for them, because they couldn’t make it. If you happen to win, it’s polite to have someone there to accept the award. Plus, free beer.
(Too late to edit my typo) *Chiwetel Ejiofor in 2013, not 2012.
Did anyone watch The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore the night before the announcements? It was hilarious - they did a bit where Robin Thede (my current TV crush) was an Entertainment Show host and was counting down the Best Upcoming Black Oscar Snubs that would happen the next morning:
Becomes even more funny and poignant given how it played out.
And surely there is some truth behind the old saying “black men can’t act”… or whatever that saying is. Something to do with slow twitch muscle fiber as I understand it.
Eyebrows 0f Doom listed the black nominees and winners for the Oscars, it actually hasn’t been that bad for black actors in the past 15 years. But here are the Latin Oscar nominees and winners:
Best Actor:
2011- Demian Bichir- A Better Life
Best Supporting Actor:
2000- Benicio del Toro- Traffic
2003- Benicio del Toro- 21 Grams- Winner
Best Actress:
2002- Salma Hayek
2004- Catalina Sandino Moreno- Maria Full of Grace
Best Supporting Actress:
2006- Adriana Barraza- Babel
2011- Berenice Bejo- The Artist
2013- Lupita Nyong’o- 12 Years a Slave- Winner
And here are the Asian Oscar nominees:
Best Actor:
2003- Ben Kingsley- House of Sand and Fog
Best Supporting Actor:
2001- Ben Kingsley- Sexy Beast
2003- Ken Watanabe- The Last Samurai
Best Actress:
none
Best Supporting Actress:
2003- Shohreh Aghdashloo- House of Sand and Fog
2006- Rinko Kikuchi- Babel
2010- Hailee Steinfeld- True Grit
Latinos make up 17% of the US population, and Asians make up 5%, compared to the 2.6% and 2% of Oscar nominees. And several of the nominees aren’t American, so that throws off the numbers more if you really want to talk representation.
I agree. I’m not super big on the Oscars, because it is so arbitrary, and a lot of great movies and performances are overlooked, while a lot of not as good ones win. Look back at the nominees and winners from 10 years ago and you’ll see more than a few forgettable movies on the list. But they do show what is valued in Hollywood, and winners do often get a boost to their career. And Oscar bait movies and Oscar nominees and winners do get a bigger bump in revenue.
The lack of non-white actors being nominated is not the biggest injustice in the world, but it’s worth pointing out. I’m not hoping for a quota system or anything silly like that, but I’m hoping that more studios hear people talking about the imbalance, and start making some more diverse movies, give them Oscar campaigns, and the Academy gives those movies due consideration.
You can say that with a straight face, here on this board that never met a worthy best picture winner?
Two words. Judi Dench. If she can win one, why not Chiwetel Eljiofor?
Frankly, it’s this kind of comment that is symptomatic of the reality that leads to this thread. Dismiss legitimate claims about noms not going to deserving black people by promoting an “everyone gets a trophy” awards process?
The awards aren’t always about quality. There are many years where an older actor gets an award that’s really because of the body of work. It’s like a"make up" call in basketball.
The oscars are just a very public “employee of the year” awards, and the company is repeatedly saying they don’t value a chuck of their own staff. I personally do not believe that the Academy continuously cannot find awardable performance out of all the black people in the business. It’s passive racism. Academy members don’t watch “black” films, so these films never even get considered.
I’m not the target audience for Straight Outta Compton, or any Madea films, but if I were in the Academy I’d sure as hell watch them, to see if something should be nominated.
Bolding mine. That is probably a step too far in your post that I agree with. Tyler Perry should not win a goddamned thing for those movies. I appreciate that he’s created essentially the only outlet for black actors to find regular work, but his movies are shit.
Are the same activists who are upset about this similarly upset about the racial disparity in the NBA?
According to racial equality activist Richard Lapchick, the NBA in 2015 was composed of 74.4 percent black players, 23.3 percent white players, 1.8 percent Latinos, and 0.2 percent Asian. Yet, per the U.S. Census Bureau, those who identified only as African American make up 13.2% of the U.S. population.
What activists? As far as I know, this is just something that a bunch of media outlets and other people have noticed and are talking about.
And no, of course no one who is not a moron is upset about the race of NBA players. Because that is a strong meritocracy; teams have a big incentive to hire the best players they can regardless of color. But the incentives in movie-making, where applicable, seem to mostly work the other way. The default character and actor in the median film is always white.
Benicio del Toro won his Oscar for “Traffic,” not “21 Grams.”
As to Asian nominees, I think it says a lot about their shot at an Oscar that Wikipedia had to classify Hailee Steinfeld as “Asian” just to have much of a list.