On-screen representation for minorities goes beyond numbers
By now, the systemic underrepresentation of people of colour at the Oscars has been well established (#OscarsSoWhite), to the point that the Academy is addressing the issue, by seeking to double its diverse and women members by 2020.
However, representation goes beyond numbers. Sure, the numbers are depressing, but if we look at the times when a minority actor does win an award, it paints a more complicated picture of representation.
As pointed out by Venngage, minority Oscars winners are often recognised for playing a famous person, or for roles that are based on a racial stereotype.
For instance, four out of five Asian actors have won an Oscars playing biographical figures — Gandhi, Dith Pran, the Cambodian photojournalist, Antonio Salieri, the Italian composer and foe of Mozart, and Freddie Mercury, played by the latest Best Actor Rami Malek. Not that this undermines their merits in any way, but this demonstrates a rather narrow view of minority actors. Since the Oscars is considered one of, if not the highest accolade in show business, the industry in general would be incentivised to continue casting minorities in such roles. Or it might feed into the belief that minority actors are only justified to play leading roles if he or she plays an exceptional character of the same ethnicity.
Actors who may be uneasy with playing into racial stereotypes (in the form of accent, occupations, and character) may swallow their own discomfort in order to get a foot in mainstream media, therefore indirectly contributing to the normalisation of casting minorities as stereotypes.
But are we expecting too much from the Oscars? Despite its recent move towards inclusivity, it is still an elite institution that mirrors the United State’s own history of racism. In 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black woman to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. However, she was seated far away from her costars at a separate table, accompanied by an escort and her white producer because racial segregation was still in place.
So I decided to look at something more mainstream. Blockbuster mainstream, in fact, to see if there has been greater diversity in blockbuster movies since 1997. Here are a few of my observations:
- Movies have been featuring increasingly diverse casts across all minority groups — Asians, African Americans, Hispanics, and others from 1997–2018. We can pretty much expect this trend to continue, with Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians revolutionalising the movie industry by becoming blockbuster hits and receiving critical acclaim (Black Panther is the first-ever superhero movie to be nominated for Oscar’s Best Picture, while Crazy Rich Asians was nominated for two Golden Globes).
- Diversity sells. Hollywood has an inertia towards casting minority actors in lead roles because of the conventional wisdom that they don’t sell as well. Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; because Hollywood holds this belief, fewer minorities get cast in movies, and so on the whole, movies featuring a more diverse cast would lose out to movies featuring mostly white actors. What I’ve found is that from 2008 onwards, when more diverse movies are produced, they tend to be more profitable than movies featuring all-white casts only.
- Asians find most representation in action, fantasy, and war genre. Once again representation isn’t just about headcount. It is also about telling meaningful stories where the character’s purpose is more than his / her ethnicity. Unfortunately in Hollywood produced movies, Asian characters and locations are still somewhat exoticised because they are seen through a Western gaze.
If you’d like to read more about what I’ve found analysing 21 years of blockbuster movies (that’s 1251 movies for you!), you can check out my visual essay here.
