I fall on the side that this is a Hollywood issue and not an Oscars issue.
But I also concede that it is probably a social/money issue that drives these things. Some roles sort of have to be a certain race (Steve Jobs in his biopic should not be played by a black man) but others are largely race neutral yet are almost always played by a white male. Studios do this because of money. They think that a white actor will attract more money. And while I don’t want it to be true, it probably is true. And if it isn’t true, no one is willing to risk millions testing conventional wisdom.
So… Some of the wealthiest and most popular people in America get together for glorified mutual masturbation and collective ego-stroking, and people actually think the outcomes have any meaning or intrinsic value whatsoever… Um… yeah…
Um, yea, they do have meaning, whether you like it or not. Meaning to the recipients. Meaning to the industry.
An actor with an Oscar nom, or better, a win, can command a bigger salary, get better roles, command more respect. An Oscar-nominated or -winning film can make more money. It can also lead to Hollywood making a ton of films that try to duplicate the success of the winner, often poorly. Intrinsic value? No. Effect on movies we see? Absolutely.
What difference would it make to anyone who is not in business or related to Samuel L Jackson if he got nominated or won an Oscar? Jackson has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do an easy job he apparently enjoys. He is literally one of the luckiest people in the history of the world. No sane person could spend one moment feeling bad for him, because a bunch of old actors did not think he was one of the five best performances in film this year.
Olivia Spencer was able to use her Oscar win to get a recurring role on the sitcom Mom. Mo’nique was able to use her win to get one movie role in the next five years.
Barkhad Abdi was able to use his nomination to get a guest role on Hawaii 5 O.
With the juice of a nomination Samuel L Jackson or Will Smith might have been able to finally get a role or two.
How about separate, yet equal, ceremonies if it is determined by a select committee that the Real Oscars aren’t as diverse as it should be for a given year? Maybe the ceremony for the colored nominees could then be held the next afternoon at the local YMCA party room. Perhaps BET and Telemundo can cover it, broadcasting it to thousands. Panera Bread can cater it, with complementary boxes of wine on each nominees card table.
And it’s also about the movies that are made. I haven’t seen Steve Jobs or Joy or Trumbo, and I’m sure that they are all fine and the performances are good, but why are those the movies that are made and nominated? If you got a good director and cast, you could have good movies about Percy Julian, or Josephine Baker, or Comandante Ramona. And with a good Oscar push you could maybe get some nominations. But mostly those aren’t the movies being made.
The Oscars by themselves aren’t the main issue, they just highlight the bigger issues with the movie industry. Just Asking Questions’ comparison to Employee of the Year awards is a good one. If you keep awarding Employee of the Year to white people, you might very well be awarding it to the best person. But if it’s because there are very few white people in your company, and those non-white people don’t get as good jobs and as good projects to work on, there looks like there’s an issue with your hiring policies.
There are some people who get nominated or win and have their careers take off, and some who it seems to make no difference. You can pick and choose either to illustrate your point, I’m having a hard time finding overall how much it helps.
It’s true that it doesn’t necessarily help woman and non-white people as much, but that’s more of again an illustration of the discrimination in Hollywood.
Looking at the two lists given here, doesn’t seem in recent years Blacks are particularly under-represented but Latinos are getting hosed, if you compare actual US population ratio to Oscar ratios.
It’s not just that it matters to the actors nominated or not nominated, it matters to the culture; where white is still the default American and any film with more than one non-white is an ethnic movie. I think we’re slowly reaching the tipping point though, were the Ocscars are so obviously out of touch with society as a whole that they are just not that culturally relevant; they’ve become the Lawrence Welk Show, old white people entertaining other old white people and no one else.
I was thinking about this issue because of this thread, and it occurred to me: why aren’t there more black people in modern films, such as SWTFA? Why is Finn the only one in the entire movie? Couldn’t Rey*, Hux, Lor San Tekka, any of the nameless background characters, or even Unkar Plutt, Captain Phasma or Snoke, be played by black actors?
After reading the posts in the SWTFA thread, where someone complained that having Finn be black was “ramming political correctness down our throats”, I guess I know the answer. And, as madmonk says, then it would be a “black” film.
But WHY? Why does it have to be that way? When that default changes, then we won’t have threads like this, I guess.
*unless she’s Luke’s daughter, and even then, who is to say her mother wasn’t black?
I’ve been watching Master of None on Netflix. Aziz Ansari plays an actor living in NY. In one episode he and a friend who is also Indian audition for the same ensemble sitcom, they both do well, but find out they can only have one Indian guy on the show or else it becomes an ethnic show. It’s a pretty good episode.
I don’t just agree in entirety with one side of this debate, I can see both arguments. I have no issue per say if one year it happened that all nominees were white. I would find it hard to buy if year after year all were white and no non white actors or movies were recognized. That is simply unrealistic.
But I would hate to have a system where one slot was allocated for non whites actors, it would seem forced and unfair. Just nominate films, directors and actors who gave a great performance. Sometimes the black or Latino is more deserving, other times it’s the white man.
This is the second year in a row with all white nominees among the actors and Halle Berry was the first woman of color to win a best actress Oscar and that didn’t happen until 2001; so we have had years and years of actors of color being ignored. The voting academy skews to old white men.
What’s changed is that our culture is a little more comfortable questioning the assumed privilege of old white men to be the ones who have a monopoly on calling the shots in our society.
We already sort of have that system. Why are there awards for best male and best female of everything? Why do women need their own award? Is that a case of the same thing as having a “best black actor”?
Of course, you know the reality - if there was only “best actor (gender not specified)”, then every nomination would be a man, all the time.
I don’t know if you skipped her deliberately, but the character of Maz Kanata, a critical “alien effects” character, was played by Lupita N’yongo, who is assuredly black (and, of course, has her very own Oscar.)
People seem to be skipping over Eyebrows of Doom’s post demonstrating that over the course of 20 years the rate at which black actors have been nominated for, and won, Oscars, is about what one would expect by random chance, given the number of black people in the USA and UK (the countries that make up the enormous majority of movies that get Academy attention.) There is not a whit of statistical basis for the notion black people are being unfairly treated in acting nominations at the Oscars.
No black actors were nominated this year, but in 2006 black actors got five of twenty nominations, winning two of the four awards, which is disproportionately HIGH as compared to what random chance would suggest. It’s hard for me to believe the Academy wasn’t racist in 2006 but is now.
That’s assuming that all Oscars are weighted the same, when you look at the best actor/actress and best director category it tells a different story. In fact, I don’t think any black person has ever won best director.
I can’t state one way or the other whether those who nominate people for the Oscars are racist or not. I can’t state one way or the other if actors/actresses are chosen from specific films because of their color or if other actors/actresses are not chosen from specific films because of their color.
I can’t state any facts on this subject because I’m not (nor most likely will ever be) a member of the Academy. And I’m guessing many of you are in the same boat.
But as an opinion on this subject….
I’ve read all of the posts and there are a lot of “reasons” being thrown about, here’s one I haven’t read yet.
If you were to go through the history of the Oscar awards, go through all the films that were nominated and all the films that actors and actresses were nominated from, my guess is that a great majority of those films are period pieces. Stories from biblical times, ancient England, colonial times, etc… A great many films that are nominated are usually those types of films and if you make films from history, SPECIFICALLY from Western history, the majority of main characters are generally Caucasian.
If you’ll notice films that cover more recent history, specifically in the last few decades, you’re seeing more of a diversity of people, because in recent history more non whites are in positions that hundreds of years ago were only held by whites.