#oscarssowhite
It was in 2015 that the hashtag OscarsSoWhite made its first appearance. The hashtag was created by April Reign, expressing her frustration about the Academy Awards’ choice of nominees. Rightfully so, two years in a row, the Academy Awards had excluded black representation and/or any other minority from its list of nominees. The hashtag went viral and started a conversation. African-American celebrities like Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Idris Elba and Spike Lee spoke out about the lack fo diversity. The Smiths and Spike Lee even boycotted the awards due to its lack of diversity.
As a result of the massive outrage, the Academy promised to make changes and added almost eight hundred new voting members in 2017. The new members, including Dwayne Johnson and Leslie Jones, were thirty nine percent female and thirty percent non-white. Fast forward to 2017, “Moonlight”, an all African American crew, won Best Picture and received numerous other nominations. But despite the big win, other minorities were still underrepresented.
In 2018, the Academy Awards tried to shift gears and the event turned into a love fest of representation. Jordan Steele was the first African-American man to win Best Original Screenplay for Get Out in 80 years. It was also the first time that a transsexual woman presented and the first time an 89-year-old gay man won for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name. Guillermo del Toro won best director for The Shape of Water, proving that Mexicans weren’t all rapists and murderers as claimed by the American President.
But was it just all a show? While del Toro and Steele won for the highest categories, not one single person of colour won in the acting categories. It was also not a fair representation of women as only eight won the Oscar in comparison to thirty-three men. Furthermore, in this year’s nominations, Dee Rees is the first black woman to be nominated to Best Adapted-Screenplay for Mudbound, ever.
While the Academy Award’s continues to insists on its old world Hollywood style, the irony of its lack of vision is that inclusiveness actually makes money. April Reign writes in Vanity Fair, “Creative Artists Agency released the findings of its Motion Picture Diversity Index, confirming that the more inclusive a film is the more money it makes.” A good example of this would be the recent smash hit Black Panther that has made almost 800 Million in just 2 weeks after its release.
So maybe it’s us. Maybe we should stop holding the Academy Awards at such high regard and look at it realistically, viewership of the Awards have been at an all time record low, this year being the lowest in history. Maybe with its dwindling viewership symbolizes its dwindling relevance. Let’s wait and see.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/is-the-era-of-oscarssowhite-over
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/25/oscarssowhite-right-and-wrong-academy-awards-audience
