Will we ever see end to mostly white Oscars?
In 2015, April Reign started a movement from her living room when she tweeted, “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair.”
The tweet went viral, jumpstarting an international conversation about race in the entertainment industry, and #OscarsSoWhite has continued to trend every year since Reign first pointed out that all 20 actors who had received Oscar nominations are white.
In response, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Cheryl Boone Issacs — the third woman and first person of color to lead the organization — announced a five-year plan focused on improving representation and diversity in industry practices and hiring. But, while non-white membership in the Academy has doubled since, the pool of eligible Oscar voters remains 84% white and 68% male.
And, five years later, there are still only two non-white nominees across all four acting categories this year — black British actress Cynthia Erivo and Spanish actor Antonio Banderas.
There’s certainly no shortage of qualified actors: 31 of the 100 top-grossing films from 2019 cast a non-white person in a starring or co-starring role, many of whom were floated by the media as potential nominees prior to the official announcement.
This may seem like jealous bean-counting designed to stir up racial tensions. After all, shouldn’t Oscars be awarded on the basis of merit, not race?
While it is true that quota-based systems rarely work well, and often harm the very people they are intended to help, analyzing demographic trends — such as the seemingly large gap in Academy Awards nominations by race — can help unearth deeper structural problems.
People should be rewarded for the hard work they do, not what demographic check-boxes they can tick off, but what some shortsighted advocates of meritocracy overlook is that, for centuries, government and cultural norms have kept a firm thumb on the scales.
Modern Hollywood arose under Jim Crow and the pernicious stain of racial segregation did not leave the budding film industry untarnished.
Until the 1930s, nonwhite roles were generally played by white actors in blackface so that white actors would not have to work with black actors.
When roles did start to open up for black actors and actresses, they were largely limited to subservient and demeaning stereotypes. Even today, many producers and studio executives regard movies with black casts as economically risky with limited marketability.
This mindset means movies with majority-minority casts often receive smaller budgets than a sim- ilar movie with a more white cast might have, according to “The Hollywood
Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry” author Maryann Erigha, who analyzed the budgets and racial makeup of 1,300 films.
But, according to the 2019 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, “films with casts that were from 31% to 40% minority enjoyed the highest median global box office receipts, while those with majority-minority casts posted the highest median return on investment.”
In other words, making more diverse films is good business. April Reign’s 2015 tweet identified some painful scars from America’s past. Healing these wounds will take years, but we are well on our way.