January 15th was just an ordinary day. I was eating lunch at Allison with my lovely suitemates, reading my newsfeed. All of a sudden, it blew up with post after post, article after article depicting the outrage and disbelief regarding this year’s Oscar nominations. I’m not going to lie, I’m not into awards season. Unless there’s an actress/actor or movie I’m really rooting for that year, I won’t even know when the shows are (this year, they are February 22nd, which I had to Google). I don’t even know if I’ve sat down and watched a full Academy Awards show. But, red carpet enthusiast or not, you’d have to be blind not to see the extreme bias in this year’s nominees.
Now, this doesn’t have to do with Jennifer Aniston not getting nominated (though she should have), or about “The Lego Movie” being completely overlooked for Best Animated Feature (also preposterous). This has to do with the lack of diversity in the nominees. In the five biggest categories for individuals — Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress — there is a total of one person who is not white.
Outside of the categories that are exclusively for actresses, there is an intense scarcity of women nominated for Oscars as well. There are no women nominated for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Visual Effects, or Best Sound Mixing.
“But who would have been nominated in their place, smartass?” Well…I don’t know. And that’s the point. Even though women and people of color have achieved so much equality, they are still striving for something way above their heads. Women only make up 7% of film directors, 19% of executive producers and 5% of cinematographers. Of the top 250 highest grossing films of 2014, women filled only 17% of leadership positions. And the more women we have writing and directing, the more strong female characters will be seen in movies. 46% of all characters in a show were female when there was at least one female writer, as opposed to 39% when there were no female writers.*
For people of color, it’s very much the same story. In a 2013 USC study, almost 20% of the 3,932 films included in the study depicted no African-American or Black speaking characters. Out of those movies, 74.1% of the speaking characters were white. Of the 107 directors attached to the 100 top-grossing films of 2013, only 7 were black, and not one of them a black woman.**
Okay, okay, I’ll chill with the numbers for now. But the point is, having more women and people of color in leadership positions will change how our movies look. Women don’t have to play a stereotypical role, and nor do Blacks or Latinos.
We all just need to be aware that inequality is a very real thing that is still running rampant in our society, even for the most powerful and influential human beings. Once more color and women are added to the 93% white and 76% male Oscar voting demographic and to the film industry in general, we will begin to see change in how our movies look.***
*Statistics taken from Buzzfeed.com’s article about a recent study done by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, looking at the top 250 movies of 2014.
**Statistics taken from Alldigitocracy.org’s article on a study done by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, looking at lack of diversity in films in 2013.
***Taken from a Los Angeles Times report last June on diversity (or lack thereof) among Academy Awards voters.