It was a year ago that Lupita Nyong’o, shortly before winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, gave a speech about what she called “dark beauty”.
Nyong’o spoke tenderly of receiving a letter from a girl who had been about to lighten her skin before Nyong’o’s success. She said “you saved me”. The letter struck Nyong’o because she recognised herself in that girl: “I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin. And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey,” concluded Nyong’o.
The Mexican-born, Kenyan-raised actress was a central part last year to an Academy Awards flush with faces uncommon to the Oscar podium. There was Ellen DeGeneres, a proud lesbian, hosting. There was the first Latino, Alfonso Cuaron, winning Best Director. There was the black filmmaker Steve McQueen hopping for joy after his 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture.
What a difference a year makes.
This year’s Oscars repeat a stubborn pattern that has plagued the Academy Awards throughout its history: whenever change seems to come, a frustrating hangover follows.
A year after Chris Rock hosted the 2005 awards show, which featured nods for Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, Jamie Foxx and Sophie Okonedo, the ’06 nominees followed with only Terrence Howard.
Seldom have such fits and starts been starker than this Oscars, coming a year after a richly diverse Oscar crop. In Sunday’s Academy Awards, all 20 acting nominees are white, a result that prompted some to declare that they would boycott this year’s ceremony. The lack of nominations for Selma director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo were a particular flashpoint, viewed by many as unjust oversights not only because they merited honouring, but because their absences furthered an ignoble Oscar history.
An Associated Press survey of the academy’s voting history since the first Academy Awards in 1929 shows gradual progress, but not nearly at a rate to match the ever-increasing diversity of the American public. In those 87 years, nine black actors have won Oscars, four Latinos and three Asians, a record that doesn’t even speak to other categories like Best Director, where only one woman (Kathryn Bigelow) has won.
The number of non-whites to be nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress has nearly doubled in just the last two decades, but the 9.4 percent of non-white acting nominees over the academy’s history is about four times less than the percentage of the non-white population.
Not all of this can be laid at the film academy’s feet, but some of it can. The 6 000-plus membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was found to be 94 percent white and 77 percent male in 2012. Since becoming president of the academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs has worked to diversify its ranks, though change comes slowly considering membership is for life.
But the academy is a reflection of the film industry; it can only reward the films that get made. What this year’s all-white acting nominees did was lay bare the enormous, hulking iceberg of the movie business’ diversity problems.
A UCLA diversity report released last year after eight years of research put numbers to an often amorphous issue. It was arguably the most comprehensive such study, and it found the underrepresentation of minorities and women throughout film and TV, from board rooms to talent agencies.
What’s particularly galling for many of those working to change Hollywood is that minorities are among its most passionate customers. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, Hispanics made up 25 percent of moviegoers in 2013, more than their 17 percent share of the population.
With studies finding so little progress, it has been proposed that the industry adopt a modified version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which stipulates that teams must interview minorities for vacant coaching jobs, to give greater transparency to the hiring process.
Not everyone agrees. Lionel Chetwynd, an Oscar-nominated writer and an academy member, argued against Al Sharpton’s post-nominations call for a task force. (Said Sharpton: “The movie industry is like the Rocky Mountains, the higher you get, the whiter it gets.”)
The one thing that is definitely improving is the volume level. The uproar over the Oscar nominations only added to a swelling cacophony in the last year.
Saturday Night Live was shamed into diversifying its cast. The Ridley Scott Moses epic Exodus: Gods and Kings was slammed for casting white leads as Egyptians. The leaked Sony e-mails embarrassed executives for jokes about President Obama’s presumed taste in movies. Rock, as good a commentator on race relations as we have, penned a thoughtful essay on what he called “a white industry”.
“How many black men have you met working in Hollywood? They don’t really hire black men,” wrote Rock. “But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You’re in LA, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.”
Why does all this matter? It isn’t just an issue of equal opportunity, though it is that. It’s because when people aren’t reflected in culture, when they don’t see themselves on screens, behind cameras or on the Oscar stage, they feel invisible and voiceless. Hollywood would do well to remember that young girl who wrote to Nyong’o, and hope to inspire a flood of such letters. – Sapa-AP