Oscar spotlight draws attention to industry diversity issue
It was a year ago that Lupita Nyong’o, shortly before winning the Academy Award for best supporting actress, gave a speech about what she called “dark beauty.”
Nyong’o, who so dazzled Hollywood and the Oscar- viewing public through awards season, spoke tenderly of receiving a letter from a girl who had been about to lighten her skin before Nyong’o’s success, she said, “saved me.” The letter struck Nyong’o because she recognized herself in that girl: “I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin.”
“And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey,” concluded Nyong’o, accepting an award at the Black Women in Hollywood luncheon.
The Mexican-born, Kenyan- raised actress was a central part last year of an Academy Awards flush with faces uncommon to the Oscar podium. There was Ellen DeGeneres, a proud lesbian, hosting. There was the first Latino, Alfonso Cuaron, winning best director. There was the black filmmaker Steve McQueen hopping for joy after his “12 Years a Slave” won best picture.
What a difference a year makes.
This year’s Oscars repeat a stubborn pattern that has plagued the Academy Awards throughout its history: Whenever change seems to come, a frustrating hangover follows. “Every 10 years, we have the same conversation,” Spike Lee, a regular witness to the sporadic progress, has said. A year after Chris Rock hosted the 2005 awards show, which featured nods for Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, Jamie Foxx and Sophie Okonedo, the ’06 nominees followed with only Terrence Howard.
Seldom have such fits and starts been starker than this Oscars, coming a year after a richly diverse Oscar crop. In Sunday’s Academy Awards, all 20 acting nominees are white, a result that prompted some to declare they would boycott this year’s ceremony. The lack of nominations for “Selma” director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo were a particular flashpoint.
“I was surprised but then I wasn’t,” said Darnell Hunt, a UCLA professor and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, who co-authored a 2014 diversity report on the film and TV industries. “What we saw in terms of the nominations this year was business as usual. What we got was more or less an accurate reflection of the way the industry is structured and the way the academy is populated.”
An Associated Press survey of the academy’s voting history since the first Academy Awards in 1929 shows gradual progress but not nearly at a rate to match the ever- increasing diversity of the American public. In those 87 years, 15 black actors, four Latinos and three Asians have won Oscars, a record that doesn’t even speak to other categories such as best director, where only one woman (Kathryn Bigelow) has won.
The number of nonwhites to be nominated for best actor or best actress has nearly doubled in the past two decades, but the 9.4 percent of nonwhite acting nominees over the academy’s history is about four times less than the percentage of the nonwhite population.
Not all of this can be laid at the film academy’s feet, but some of it can. The 6,000-plus membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was found to be 94 percent white and 77 percent male in a 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation. Since becoming president of the academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs has worked to diversify the academy’s ranks, though change comes slowly considering membership is for life.
“In the last two years, we’ve made greater strides than we ever have in the past toward becoming a more diverse and inclusive organization through admitting new members and more inclusive classes of members,” Isaacs told The AP shortly after nominations were announced. “And, personally, I would love to see and look forward to see a greater cultural diversity among all our nominees in all of our categories.”
But the academy is a reflection of the film industry; it can only reward the films that get made. What this year’s all-white acting nominees did was lay bare the enormous, hulking iceberg of the movie business’ diversity problems.
The UCLA diversity report released last year put numbers to an often amorphous issue. It was arguably the most comprehensive such study, and it found the underrepresentation of minorities and women throughout film and TV, from board rooms to talent agencies.
“White males have dominated things for so long that it’s been hard to imagine an alternative that would produce or be open to producing the types of projects that are likely to enlist more people of color or women. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, this vicious cycle that produces the same type of stuff over and over again,” Hunt said. “It’s hard to blame any single institution. It’s not all the networks. It’s not all the studios. It’s not all the talent agencies. But together, the way they all do business, combines to create this stalemate where we just don’t get past where we are right now.”
FILE – This Oct. 9, 2013 file photo provided by the Metropolitan Opera shows Nico Muhly at the Met in New York. The Metropolitan Opera has commissioned Muhly to compose “Marnie” for its 2019-20 season, based on Winston Graham’s 1961 novel that was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. (AP Photo/Metropolitan Opera, Jonathan Tichler)
FILE – In this March 2, 2014 file photo, Ellen DeGeneres hosts the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. The 87th Academy Awards will be held Sunday, Feb., 22, 2015 and will be hosted by Neil Patrick Harris. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP, File)
FILE – In this March 2, 2014 file photo, Alfonso Cuaron poses in the press room with the award for best director and best editing for “Gravity” in Los Angeles. The 87th Academy Awards will be held Sunday, Feb., 22, 2015 and will be hosted by Neil Patrick Harris. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
FILE – In this March 2, 2014 file photo, Lupita Nyongo accepts the award for best actress in a supporting role for “12 Years a Slave” during the Oscars in Los Angeles. Nyongo dazzled Hollywood and the Oscar-viewing public through awards season last year. The Mexican-born, Kenyan-raised actress was a central part last year to an Academy Awards flush with faces uncommon to the Oscar podium. There was Ellen DeGeneres, a proud lesbian, hosting. There was the first Latino, Alfonso Cuaron, winning best director. There was the black filmmaker Steve McQueen hopping for joy after his 12 Years a Slave won best picture. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP, File)
FILE – In this March 2, 2014 file photo, Lupita Nyong’o accepts the award for best actress in a supporting role for “12 Years a Slave” during the Oscars in Los Angeles. Nyong’o dazzled Hollywood and the Oscar-viewing public through awards season last year. The Mexican-born, Kenyan-raised actress was a central part last year to an Academy Awards flush with faces uncommon to the Oscar podium. There was Ellen DeGeneres, a proud lesbian, hosting. There was the first Latino, Alfonso Cuaron, winning best director. There was the black filmmaker Steve McQueen hopping for joy after his “12 Years a Slave” won best picture. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP, File)