By: Claire Kim
While Chris Rock’s Oscars opening monologue was praised by many for calling out the diversity problem that would be featured in the show itself, he took a lot of heat for his joke about the three Asian kids that he brought out on stage and claimed to be part of the accounting team that tallied the Oscar votes. NBA player Jeremy Lin took to Twitter to express his outrage over the poorly aired joke, which was during an awards show that was supposed to be highlighting the racial inequality of the show.
This has been the second year in a row of an all-white nomination list being pulled from a diversely-talented pool of films. However, this is not the first incidence of Hollywood deliberately ignoring diversity.
The practice of taking ethnic characters and having white actors and actresses play them is so common that it even has a name – “whitewashing”. The new movie Gods of Egypt, a new fantasy action film, was heavily criticized for its all-white cast playing ancient Egyptian deities, which in modern day accuracy would have to be portrayed with actors of an African ethnicity. Aloha, directed by Cameron Crowe, featured a quarter-Asian, quarter-Hawaiian lead played by Emma Stone, a distinctly non-Asian and non-Hawaiian actress.
This aversion to diversity does not make sense economically. According to the third annual Hollywood Diversity Report from the UCLA Bunche Center, “Films with relatively diverse casts enjoyed the highest median global box office receipts and the highest median return on investment”. The report also found that minorities accounted for the majority of ticket sales for four top-10 films in 2014, and that Twitter activity was highest for TV series with casts that had broad minority-representation.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been taking steps to ensure that future years will be less controversial. The Academy’s president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, has proposed a change to the 6,000 member voting body selection process. Among some of these changes will be to cut Academy members who are no longer active in the film industry, while doubling the number of minority voters. This has led to some backlash amongst voters, who claim that this is a plot to get rid of older white contributors. As of now, however, the voting body is made up of white male voters who have a median age of 62 – vastly different from the diverse makeup of the United States.
However, greater diversity in Hollywood is still a work in progress. “The primary reason the Oscars are so white this year and most years is that the movie industry is overwhelmingly white,” said Manohla Dargis, one of The New York Times’ chief film critics. If diversity is ever going to become commonplace in films, people must support the few films that do have representation, to send a message to Hollywood that change is necessary.
