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When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its Oscar nominations last week, all the chosen actors had one thing in common: whiteness. They also gave fine performances, to be sure, but so did actors of color who were, for the second consecutive year, shut out of the most important awards pageant in Hollywood. The reaction by the public was swift. Hashtags trended. Actors decried the lack of representation. Commenters on web sites argued. Boycotts were called. And now the president of the Academy has responded.
In a statement released on Twitter last night, Cheryl Boone Isaacs pledged to do more to diversify the makeup of the voting Academy members. "In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond," she wrote.
She's got a lot of work to do. According to a 2014 survey, 94 percent of the voting members of the Academy are white and 76 percent are male (full disclosure: this reporter's father is a white, male, voting member of the Academy). Those numbers don't even begin to represent the true demographics of America. The most recent U.S. census, taken the same year as the Oscar survey, estimates that the U.S. is approximately 77 percent white. The Oscars are merely a symptom of the larger problem infecting Hollywood. According to the 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA, 94 percent of studio heads were white and a whopping 100 percent were male.
Voting membership in the Academy is limited to people working on theatrically-released films and who are sponsored by two current Academy members. So, though Isaac's acknowledgement of the problem is an important step, to diversify its fanciest party first Hollywood must work to diversify itself.
