It’s a staggering moment for every actor and actress who earns their spot as an Academy Award nominee. However, it’s the ultimate holy grail of Hollywood to hear your name called as the Oscar winner of your nominated category. Unfortunately, the racial and ethnic biases of the Academy, as well as the lack of diversity in nominees and winners, have only become transparent in more recent years as our shield of ignorance has diminished. Depending on how you look at it, this revelation comes with some benefits and drawbacks. The more attention on this bias comes to light, the more likely the Academy is to acknowledge this inequity and choose their nominees and winners with a less discriminatory mindset. Nevertheless, racism continues to plague decisions despite criticism and stands as an obstacle for minorities, most made clear by the infamous #OscarSoWhite.
The Oscars have historically had little-to-no diversity. According to Venngage, “In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar for her role as a maid (‘Mammy’) in Gone With The Wind.” After Hattie’s speech, however, she then walked all the way to the back of the banquet hall to a small round table that she shared with her escort, Ferdinand Yober, where she was segregated from the rest of the white guests and the Gone with the Wind cast. It took another 24 years for another Black actor to win an Oscar, Sidney Poiter in 1963, and another 27 years for another Black woman to win, Whoopi Goldberg for her role in the film Ghost.
As opinions on race have become more contemporary and support for people of color has significantly increased since past Oscars, the Academy has also become increasingly more progressive in nominating minorities for Academy Awards. The real question is, have they progressed enough? A pivotal moment in Oscar history occurred most recently in 2016 with the popularity of the #OscarsSoWhite. The public assembled with the shared agreement that most winners were white, with very few numbers of people of color.
According to BBC, “In 2020 the Academy announced that they had exceeded the goals set in 2016, having doubled the number of female members from 1,446 to 3,179 and tripled their members of [color] from 554 to 1,787.” With these statistics, we got a little bit of insight that the public does have some sway in Academy decisions and that they had made some major changes in their voting body. As of 2021, 33 percent of active academy members were women (up from 25 percent in 2015), and 19 percent were from underrepresented racial or ethnic communities (up from 10 percent in 2015). The Oscars has since further diversified its new membership classes: its 2021 membership class is 46 percent women (up from 45 percent in 2020), and 39 percent of the class is from underrepresented ethnic/racial communities (up from 36 percent in 2020).
Despite the improvement, it seems we went one step forward, one step back, as the diversity for the 2022 Oscars has decreased in comparison to last year’s impressive year of Academy Award diversity. Four Black actors received nominations, but that’s down from the historic nine people of color in 2021. All nominees for best actress and best supporting actor were white.
Thus, conflicting opinions on the Academy resume. While the social media campaign on Oscar representation proved to be groundbreaking, where the Academy stands remain unclear due to the uncertainty of diversity when new nominations are released each Oscar season. While there have been some major improvements within the inner system, racism continues to be a problem and improvement remains up in the air.
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