Tim Walker
The Independent
LONDON: When David Oyelowo took the stage at a gala event in Los Angeles this week, he did not mince his words.
Lamenting the lack of black performers among the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards, the British actor noted that The Force Awakens, 2015’s highest-grossing film, had a black star and was knocked from atop the US box office chart by Ride Along 2, which has two. He added: “The biggest TV show on the planet is led by black people: Empire.”
What went without saying was that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself has, for the first time in its history, a black president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, whom Oyelowo was there to present with an award named after the civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In his remarks, he praised Boone Isaacs even as he reproached her organisation. “We need to support Cheryl,” Oyelowo said. “But we must make our voice heard.”
That the academy should face such a furore during her tenure had left its president “heartbroken”, she admitted in a statement released the same evening. Few have done more to promote inclusion at the Oscars than Boone Isaacs, a veteran movie publicist who pledged, when she was elected three years ago, to bring greater diversity to the academy’s membership.
In her first awards season as president, the Oscar for best picture went to 12 Years a Slave, a film written by, directed by and starring black people. Black performers were nominated in three of the four acting categories. But in 2015, and again this year, all 20 nominated actors were white. “For 20 opportunities to celebrate actors of colour, actresses of colour, to be missed last year is one thing,” Oyelowo said. “For that to happen again this year is unforgivable.”
After Oyelowo missed out on a nomination for the Martin Luther King biopic Selma last year, Boone Isaacs invited him to her office to discuss the issue. In the months that followed, the academy welcomed more than 300 new members, bringing its total voter membership to 6 261 (until Boone Isaacs’ presidency, the annual intake averaged about 100). Among them were black actors including Oyelowo, the comedian Kevin Hart, Straight Outta Compton director F Gary Gray, and the musicians John Legend and Common, who won Selma’s sole Oscar for their song Glory.
About half the employees hired by the academy in the past four years are reportedly black or ethnic minorities. The last two Oscar hosts were a gay woman, Ellen Degeneres, and a gay man, Neil Patrick Harris. This year the ceremony will be hosted by Chris Rock. The director Spike Lee, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in November, praised Boone Isaacs at the time for having “a mission, a plan to diversify the academy and move it into the 21st century”.
Yet in spite of her efforts, Boone Isaacs has no control over what or whom academy voters nominate. This year, diverse performers and directors from acclaimed films such as Beasts of No Nation, Creed and Compton were overlooked.
Now Lee has said he will not attend the “lily white” Oscars ceremony on February 28. Will Smith – whose Golden Globe-nominated turn in Concussion failed to earn him an Oscar nomination – and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith intend to boycott the event.
The ceremony throws an annual spotlight on what is an industry-wide diversity problem. Awards season is a visible symptom, not the root cause. In response to the controversy, Boone Isaacs has promised “dramatic steps” to diversify the academy and its awards – measures that may include widening the acting categories from five nominees to as many as 10 in future years.
Tim Gray, the awards editor of Variety, says: “It’s good for the academy to have a black woman president, but that’s not why she was elected. She has always been liked and respected in the industry. The job of a studio publicist is to keep peace with all the different factions: film-makers, agents, studio people – which also makes her perfect for her job with the academy.”