Could The Oscars 2016 Be The Last ‘White’ Night For The Academy?

The Oscars 2016 are on tonight, and with that, controversy rears its head. When April Reign sat down in her family room watching the Oscars 2015, she created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite out of frustration with what she was seeing. She didn’t have a game plan to create any change with her Oscar hashtag. After Oscar week 2015, things died down and that was the end of that. Oscar 2016 rolls around and it’s the same thing, anither round of all white Nominees, but this time #OscarsSoWhite has made a major impact. Reign never thought it would lead to big changes.

Thanks in part to “Oscars so white,” there has been a slow increase of diversity at the Oscars, but there is still a tremendous lack of other marginalized communities, including Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, LGBTQ, and the disabled. Why aren’t the Oscars or Hollywood acknowledging these communites? The responsibility shouldn’t be solely on the Oscars, but also on Hollywood and the big studios to create work that is representative of its audience.

For example with the Oscar-nominated film Carol, the lead actresses Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara portray a lesbian couple in the 1950s. Was it hard to cast two actual lesbian actresses been cast instead? Then there are films like Tangerine, which stars two transgendered actresses, that were overlooked by the Oscar committee, but Eddie Redmayne is nominated for playing a transwoman in the Oscar-bait film the Danish Girl. The most important aspect of having that authenticity is actors can use their personal experiences to bring authenticity and experience to their performances.

The Oscar 2016 controversy, coupled with #OscarsSoWhite, has opened a Pandora’s box of problems and deficiencies that Hollywood is suffering from. Yahoo News reports a new Hollywood study titled the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on diversity researched 109 major studio and independent films. In addition to examining TV and digital shows from September 2015-2016. Over 20,000 speaking roles, writers, and directors were researched on the “inclusivity index,” and the results are not good. Here are the results that might speak to what we’re missing from the Oscars

In the 414 studied films and series, only a third of speaking characters were female, and only 28.3 percent were from minority groups — about 10 percent less than the makeup of the U.S. population. Characters 40 years or older skew heavily male across film and TV: 74.3 percent male to 25.7 percent female.

Behind the camera, the discrepancy is even greater. Directors overall were 87 percent white. Broadcast TV directors (90.4 percent white) were the least diverse. Just 15.2 percent of directors, 28.9 percent of writers and 22.6 percent of series creators were female. In film, the gender gap is greatest: Only 3.4 percent of the films studied were directed by women, and only two directors out of the 109 were black women: Ava DuVernay (“Selma”) and Amma Asante (“Belle”).

Unfortunately, the “Oscars so white” 2016 failure does not end there. According to Variety, a new study issued by the African-American studies department at UCLA uncovered that Hollywood is missing out on a lot of money by not producing more diverse content. People of color make up for almost half of movie tickets sold in America, with Latinos taking up the largest group of non-white moviegoers at 25 percent. This shows that, although minority movie watchers make up for almost half ticket sales, they are represented in less than 15 percent of film and TV media.

The Guardian asked the question, will this be the last year for #OscarsSoWhite? Only time will tell. One thing that is clear is all Oscar-nominated within each award season should speak to those audiences who deserve representation, especially if they are paying their money to be entertained by Oscar content. Slowly but surely, there are more programs being created by large studios to train and hire writers, directors, and producers of color. This may not immediately correct the problem, but this is a start. Hollywood is in full public view and the public at large will be paying attention to their next moves.

[Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images]