Are the Oscars really becoming more inclusive?
Article - Arina Kosareva
The 95th Academy Awards ceremony was a blast, with eclectic, extravagant, quite perplexing absurdist comedy/drama Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) scoring 7 wins, including in the “Best Picture” category. Written and directed by the duo of “Daniels” aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, this film is as far from “Oscar bait” as it can be. Michelle Yeoh’s historic — first Asian actress to have won an Oscar in the “Best Actress” nomination — golden statuette is yet another clear signal of the long-awaited cinematographic tectonic shift. The Oscars are — finally! — changing. Or are they?
Copyright: Mirko Fabian / Unsplash
In crisis since 2015
The 87th Academy Awards list of nominees in all four acting categories, announced on January 15, 2015, was impressive:
The only problem with it was that no people of color were actually nominated — for the first time since 1988. Female directors were left unnoticed by the Academy as well, including Ava DuVernay, whose Selma (2014), a historical drama about Martin Luther King Jr., received high praise from the critics and multiple prestigious nominations such as the Golden Globe for “Best Director.” And so, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, coined by April Reign, a former lawyer then and a renowned advocate for diversity an inclusion now, went viral within hours after the publication of the list, stirring debate on discrimination and poor representation of minorities in mainstream film.
However, heavy criticism of the Academy in 2015 bore no fruit — the following year’s nominees in the acting categories, revealed on January 14, 2016, were all white. Again. This time, the reaction was much harsher, with numerous actors and directors suggesting to boycott the 88th Academy Awards all together. Chris Rock, who hosted the ceremony that year, cut straight to the chase in his opening speech: “Well, I’m here at the Academy Awards. Otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards. You realize, if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job! Y’all would be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”
One of the reasons behind such blatant lack of diversity in the Academy’s selections for two years in a row could have easily been the fact that its membership was fairly homogenous — in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender. As Los Angeles Times reported in 2011, the median age of those who were voting for nominees was 62, while 94% of them were Caucasian and 77% male.
Although timely and relevant, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag overlooked two very substantial and historically underrepresented groups — LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities. Ian McKellen pointed out in 2016 that no openly gay man had ever received an Oscar — meanwhile, straight actors were quite often nominated and/or won the award for playing an LGBTQ+ character. This may have very well been a reflection of a larger issue: of all the major films released in 2017, only 12.8% featured a non-heterosexual person, according to the GLAAD’s annual Studio Responsibility Index.
The situation was similar with people with disabilities. It was not as if their stories were not told on the silver screen — Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988), Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2018), to name a few, were all nominated for Oscars in the main categories (“Best Picture,” “Best Director,” etc.) and won in at least one of them. The real issue here was that only abled actors played the leading roles — studios preferred them over people with disabilities.
The Academy Awards reflected this trend quite well. By 2016, only two people with disabilities had won an Oscar in the acting nomination, with a whole of 40 years between them. Harold Russell, a WWII veteran who lost both his hands, received the “Best Supporting Actor” award for William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) in 1947, and Marlee Matlin, deaf since early childhood, was named the “Best Actress” for her role in Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God (1986) in 1987. At the same time, during the following 27 years after Dustin Hoffman’s “Best Actor” win for the portrayal of Raymond “Ray” Babbitt, a man with autism, in the Rain Man, a total of 14 Oscars were awarded to actors who did not have a disability — but played a person with one.
Lack of diversity was not the only problem of the ceremony
Disability was named one of the plot lines, along with political intrigue, war crimes, and show business, that would most likely produce an Academy Awards nomination for a film, according to the 2014 research from UCLA. This phenomenon, also known as “Oscar bait,” or nominating and awarding movies in certain genres such as drama, war, history, or biography, became yet another point of criticism for the ceremony. The Academy was also accused of selecting films that were mostly released during the so-called “Oscar season,” which usually falls between November and late December, and passing over spring or summer releases, including action films.
The process of selecting the Oscars winners was additionally criticized for bias and the lack of transparency. Apparently, whisper campaigns — a purposeful spread of rumors about the inaccuracy/inadequacy of a movie or its unethical production — were a legitimate tactics for studios and producers to eliminate competition. The infamous Harvey Weinstein was one of the architects behind these elaborate schemes: allegedly, he was the one to ensure that John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) was named the “Best Picture” at the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, even though Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1988) was believed to be a certain winner. Similarly, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) was criticized for whitewashing, the producers of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) were accused of underpaying Indian child actors, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) was labeled as justifying torture, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) was berated for historical mistakes — of the four films, only the first two ended up winning in the “Best Picture” nomination.
The scandals of 2015-2016, along with all the criticism, have severely affected the viewership of the Academy Awards ceremony. From 43 million in 2014 it dropped to 34.3 million in 2016 and further down to 26.5 in 2018. The year of 2021 was the all-time lowest for the Oscars in terms of viewership. Only 10.4 million tuned in, with the smallest share of youth, the target audience, ever, although COVID-19 restrictions have to be taken into consideration — people simply couldn’t go to the movies at the time, and the whole industry was struggling. But all in all, the Oscars were in a grave crisis, which called for an immediate and radical shift in strategy.
Saving the Oscars
CODA (2021) received an Oscar as the “Best Picture” in 2022. From right to left: Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur (the first deaf man to win in the “Best Supporting Actor” category), Marlee Matlin (the first deaf woman to be named the “Best Actress” for her role in Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God, 1986), Daniel Durant. Copyright: IMDb / Photo: IMDb
The Academy took the lack-of-diversity backlash to heart, inviting 683 (46% female and 41% people of color) and 744 (39% women and 30% people of color) new members in 2016 and 2017 respectively.
As a result, the list of nominees for the 89th Academy Awards was impressively more diverse compared to the previous years, with Black actors nominated in every acting category and 9 films and documentaries with non-white problematics singled out in the main categories. One of them, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), a coming-of-age drama about a Black gay man, triumphed at the ceremony with three Oscars — “Best Picture,” “Best Adapted Screenplay,” and “Best Supporting Actor” for Mahershala Ali. Studies also showed that between 2016 and 2023, the number of nominees from ethnic minorities increased by 9% — not much of a progress, but progress nonetheless.
LGBTQ+ community was further recognized in 2018, with Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 drama A Fantastic Woman about a transgender woman played by Daniela Vega, a transgender actress, winning in the “Best Foreign Language Film” category. Yance Ford, with his documentary Strong Island (2017) became the first transgender director nominated for Oscars, too.
However, it took a while fot the people with disabilities to be acknowledged by the Oscars. Sian Heder’s CODA (2021) about the life of the only hearing member of a deaf family (CODA literally stands for “child of deaf adults”) won in the “Best Picture” category only in 2022. Troy Kotsur became the first deaf man who received a statuette in the “Best Supporting Actor” nomination for the same film — 35 years after Marlee Matlin who also starred in the film.
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) nomination for the 91st Academy Awards in 2019 was historic. It was the first action film ever to be acknowledged in the “Best Picture” category. Definitely not “Oscar bait,” this nomination was also supposed to attract viewerships, which worked at the time — 29.6 million watched the ceremony live, a 12% increase compared to 2018.
The winners in 2020 and 2021 were a big step towards diversity, too. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) became the first “Best Picture” in a foreign language, while Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020) made her the first Asian woman (and the second woman ever) who won an Oscar in the “Best Director” category (the film was named the “Best Picture,” too).
The results of the 95th Academy Awards in 2023 seem to be the most promising in terms of diversity and objectivity. With nominations for two action movies, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick (2022) as audience attractors, the triumph of Everything Everywhere All at Once is indeed historic. A bold post-postmodern comedy starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan that ridiculed every movie cliché ever, leaving both critics and general audiences amused but also slightly confused. Michelle Yeoh’s win in the “Best Actress” category made her the first Asian woman to receive the award; Ke Huy Quan’s statuette as the “Best Supporting Actor” is certainly one of the best comebacks in movie history.
All these improvements are inspiring to say the least, and the Academy has seriously reworked the Representation and Inclusion Standards for films that aim to be nominated for the Oscars. In all four standards, of which at least two have to be met for a movie to be eligible for a nomination, the representation of ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people is mandatory both on and behind the screen, that is, in its plot and its production and development. The new regulations come into full power in 2024, but even their consideration in 2022 and 2023 has produced promising results.
Is the Academy Awards finally out of the woods? Short answer: no.
Viola Davis in the Woman King (2022) which was not nominated for the Oscars in 2023. Davis did not receive a nomination as well. Copyright: IMDb / Photo: IMDb
But despite all its advancements, the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, was still criticized anyway. The #OscarsSoMale hashtag was coined in the aftermath of the publication of the nominees for 2023. Apparently, after women have won in the “Best Director” category for two years in a row (Chloé Zhao in 2021 and Jane Campion in 2022 for the Power of the Dog), the Academy decided to give it a break — only men were nominated this year.
Unsurprisingly, diversity was the main point of criticism, too. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022) starring Viola Davis, as well as Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (2022) with Danielle Deadwyler, two films by Black directors about Back women, were overlooked to the critics’ and activists’ dismay.
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale (2022), which secured Brendan Fraser an Oscar in the “Best Actor” category, became another theme of debate in the context of the 2023 Oscars. The film was accused of fatphobia and described as a “shallow and stigmatising reflection of thin people’s assumptions about fat bodies” (The Guardian), compelling Aronofsky to defend his work publicly. Although obesity alone not necessarily equals disability, the controversy surrounding The Whale has a striking resemblance to the one about the films featuring people with disabilities played by abled actors.
Perhaps, then, the Oscars themselves are not the problem? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is behind the ceremony, is almost a century old. One of its goals now is to “recognize and celebrate all aspects of the film industry, the entertainment it provides, and the diverse, talented people who make movies,” but it was originally created only as a means of reaffirming the status-quo of that time. In the late 1920s, the film industry was quickly unionizing, so Louis B. Mayer, an influential film producer and one of the founders of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, or simply MGM, founded the Academy in 1927 as a quasi-union in the fear of losing profits if actors were to join the trend.
Did Mayer’s attempt fail? Naturally, actors unionized anyway. But one could not help but wonder: could the organization that was established to impede progress be progressive in its nature? It seems like after decades of re-affirming segregation, discrimination, and non-inclusivity, the Academy is desperately trying to be at the forefront of change in the film industry. Breaking with the past is inconceivably difficult, though, for recognizing toxic patterns never comes easy.
Here is an example. “Still, the change is nearly indescribable — going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look,” confessed Matt Damon in an interview to The Guardian in the aftermath of winning an Oscar in the “Best Screenplay” category in 1998 for Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting (1997) together with Ben Affleck. Both their careers changed dramatically after the 70th Academy Awards ceremony. Since then, they have been nominated for Oscars several times (Invictus (2009) and The Martian (2015) for Damon in acting categories and Argo (2021) in the “Best Picture” category for Affleck, which he won), along with multiple other prestigious awards.
Having said that, similar success after winning an Oscar is not guaranteed to women, especially if they are non-white. Halle Berry won in the “Best Actress” category in 2002 for Marc Forster’s Monster's Ball (2001), becoming the first Black woman to receive the award. In 1962, Rita Moreno was the first Latina actress to win an Oscar as the “Best Supporting Actress” for her role in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961). Both confirmed that the golden statuette did not bring them greater scripts and more recognition. On the contrary, they felt more isolated than before. “I think it’s largely because there was no place for someone like me,” admitted Berry to Variety.
Since the 1st Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, women and people of color have been severely underrepresented. Only 17% of all the nominees over the past 94 years were female, and only 6% had ethnic background, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Less than 1% of the nominees since 1960s belonged to the LGBTQ+ community, and the share of people with disabilities is even more miniscule. Is this really the Oscars’ problem? More like the society’s. And it seems like the Academy is doing as much as it can to bring about real change — and as every change, it is not perfect.