One big thing was missing from the prestigious Oscar nominations: diversity. For the second consecutive year, all 20 acting nominees were Caucasian, prompting a revival of the hashtag #OscarSoWhite. This hashtag was just the beginning of the uproar.

After the nominations were revealed, more and more Hollywood figures started to voice their opinions. Boycotts began and debates were stirred as people called for more diversity. This leads the question, though — why wasn’t it there?

There is really no one to blame but the system itself. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences mirrors an industry that is still ridden with extremely unequal representation. The membership of the academy represents the workers of the film industry throughout the last 88 years. Because of this, members are older, and the vast majority are white and male.

This is an issue that the academy itself has decided to be active about. Cheryl Boone Isaacs, academy president, has announced that the academy will take initiatives over the next three years to double the amount of women and minorities in the academy. This is a great step, and will inevitably lead to a younger, fresher batch of nominees at the Oscars representing a larger variety of people.

The problem is that to invite minorities and women into the academy, there needs to be a sufficient amount of women and minorities working in the film industry. It’s especially a problem when the industry is systematically built to exclude them. Membership expansion will hopefully be a sign to Hollywood that there must be more voices in the marketplace, and that more stories need to be told from different viewpoints. This could cause a chain reaction allowing for more representation in our mainstream media, and with a more diverse academy, we would have more diverse nominees.

The academy has made great strides to make the future bright for these underrepresented voices, but let’s look at the present. There were a number of potential minority nominees that could have made the cut this year, but none of them did. Why did this happen? Well, it goes far beyond race. Idris Elba was considered by many to be a shoo-in for his role in “Beasts of No Nation,” but alas, no nomination.

Was this due to race? It might have had an influence, but the bigger issue here is that the film was distributed on Netflix. As previously mentioned, the academy is an older group whose entire career is based on the current film industry, which Netflix is threatening. They do not want to reward their competition.

The academy’s preferential voting system also plays a role in the lack of diversity. The academy is not actively racist, excluding minorities, but instead is not properly opening themselves to experience all the options for nominees. The Oscar voting works where the nominees are based on the number of first place votes in a category. So academy voters do not simply list their top five choices, and the actors with the most appearances get nominated. Rather, the top five actors with first place votes get nominated.

So while “Straight Outta Compton” could have been on many, many voters’ Best Picture ballot, it was not voted No. 1 enough to secure a nomination. Once again, this preferential voting system favors the status quo in Hollywood, as white males are the ones being given the resources and finances to create the films that academy members will want to vote for.

The current Hollywood structure is the virus in terms of underrepresentation, while the Oscar nominations are simply a symptom. The academy has taken it upon itself to fix the issue, but in the long run, it will take a lot more than an arbitrary list that includes diversity to fix the true virus of underrepresentation in the film industry.

Published on January 24, 2016 at 7:14 pm