BY COLE WHITE | Opinion Editor | When this year’s Oscar nominees were announced, Twitter once again exploded with outrage. The #oscarssowhite hashtag spread quickly as a large field of admirable works by black filmmakers went largely overlooked.
And as usual, it didn’t take long before someone said something terrible. Nominee Charlotte Rampling said in an interview that the outrage is “racist to whites.”
Afterwards, every normal white person collectively sighed.
There are two things wrong with Rampling’s statement. The first being that discrimination isn’t a contest. The second being that of course the Oscars are discriminatory towards blacks. This is hardly new.
How discriminatory? The Economist concluded that the odds of randomly having no African American nominees are statistically unbelievable.
To understand why, you have to look at how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences works. Then you start to realize is much less prestigious than you thought.
As of 2014, the Academy was 94 percent white with an average age of 63. Most of the Academy was born into households that probably still referred to films as “the movin’ pictures.” That’s not even considering that demographically, the Academy is whiter than North Dakota.
Is it hard to believe that a group of white, aging, entrenched oligarchs don’t share modern, progressive views? Of course not. What is hard to believe is how little they try at actually doing their job.
Many voters have anonymously admitted to not even seeing all the films that are nominated. In the case of “12 Years a Slave,” which won Best Picture in 2014, one voter admitted to not having watched it because it would be uncomfortable but voted for it anyway because it was probably significant. In another anonymous interview, a voter complained, “It’s ridiculous having 9 or 10 nominees. That’s too many movies for anyone to have to watch.”
How the Academy managed to find that guy in a nation of 69 million Netflix subscribers is anyone’s guess.
Also, most will admit the vote is based less on merit and more on time put in. The mentality of “it’s time” actually does hold sway on winners. Will Leonardo DiCaprio win this year? Probably, because the Internet has been campaigning for that for years. That’s why The Lord of the Rings Trilogy barely took home in any awards for the first or second installment. The academy was waiting for the final film before just handing them all of the awards.
All of this bleeds together to create an environment where only those with connections stand a reasonable chance at succeeding. The problem here doesn’t just lie with the Academy; it lies in the voters who are entrenched in the old Hollywood machine. The black community has had to force their way into this world to get noticed, and those who were born into it don’t recognize the need for change.
For comparison, only 12 African Americans have won Oscars in the 88 years of its existence, meanwhile there have been 46 African American Pulitzer Prize winners since 1950. Why? Because the Pulitzer Prize is awarded by a legitimate process that actually adapted to changing times.
It’s true that the president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is African American. But even she can’t help but be frustrated with how Hollywood works: “…the change is not coming as fast as we would like. We need to do more, and better and more quickly. This isn’t unprecedented for the Academy.”
“Not unprecedented” is an understatement. But things can only get better.