Oscar voters need to expand diversity
T
o rework a well-known line from Humphrey Bogart, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world what movie wins Best Picture when the Oscars are handed out a month from now.
The sun will rise, people will be born, people will die and life will go on as always whether “Spotlight” triumphs or if the statuette is instead handed to the producers of “The Big Short,” “The Revenant” or any of the other nominees.
Heck, winning a Best Picture Oscar isn’t even much of a guarantee that a movie will stand the test of time – the 1956 western “The Searchers” is considered one of the greatest American movies ever crafted, and it didn’t receive a single nomination, much less win Best Picture.
The same goes for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” and, speaking of Bogie, “The Big Sleep,” which also had a script co-written by William Faulkner, for heaven’s sake.
Nevertheless, the Oscars do serve as a kind of cultural barometer, and the fact none of the 20 acting nominees in contention this year is black, Hispanic or Asian has led to calls for boycotts and promises from director Spike Lee and actor Will Smith that they will be elsewhere when the red carpet is rolled out Feb. 28.
To make matters worse, this is the second year in a row when all the acting nominees have been white.
This led New York Times film critic A.O. Scott to remark, “At the movies, we may be in the age of ‘Chi-Raq’ and ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ but the Academy is still setting the table for ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.'”
In fairness to the Academy, it has traveled a considerable distance in acknowledging diverse film artists in recent decades. Consider the Oscars were around for 30 years before they got around to nominating an African-American in the Best Actor category, that being Sidney Poitier for “The Defiant Ones,” and another five years after that for Poitier to actually win an Oscar. Halle Berry was the first African-American to win a Best Actress Oscar, and that didn’t come to pass until 2002.
Of the 15 African-Americans who have won acting Oscars, nine have been since the turn of the century. Then there was the 2013 Best Picture winner, “12 Years a Slave,” which searingly dissected the full horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.
But the “whiteout” at the Oscars over the last two years has highlighted how the racial and gender makeup of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does not come close to matching the diversity of the country as a whole.
Of the movie professionals who are Academy members, over 75 percent are male and more than 90 percent are white. Hollywood has been accused of being a nest of lefties, but those demographics sound more like the audience for Rush Limbaugh.
The Academy has promised to speed efforts to bring more women and people of color onboard. That is a worthy effort, but a far better, more enduring solution would be for Hollywood to tell more stories that reflect what life is like in an increasingly heterogeneous country.
Considering that whites are on track to be a minority in the United States within 30 years, that not only makes artistic sense, but also economic sense.
Hollywood may be a dream factory, but it’s also a ruthlessly competitive, money-spinning enterprise. It could well be that the box office will drive diversity in Tinsel Town.