Solving the #OscarsSoWhite Controversy

[sageoftruth]

Interestingly, the Economist did a piece on this a few weeks ago, and they actually found that Blacks gets nominated for Oscars roughly in line with what their proportion of the US population is, and, in fact, they actually win Oscars at a higher proportion of what their population percentage is.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/01/film-and-race

The real discrepancy between population % and oscar representation is with Hispanic and Asian actors.

Sounds like you use the Economist for more than just passing the time during a commute. I never make it to the arts section of the magazine before the next issue comes out. Kudos.

I think it's time to call controversies like #OscarsSoWhite for what it is: First World Racism. Like First World Problems, FWR are mild grievances built up to sound like major problems.

Seriously, any and all awards and lists of "Best" art are subjective. So What! If your favorite movie or actor didn't get nominated by an award show. It's not the end of the world. If you liked the movie before the Oscar nominations were announced, they will still entertain you regardless of how many nominations it received.

I think the basketball team analogy is an appropriate one. I feel that the people who are complaining about the racial makeup of the acting nominees are being racist. Seriously, would it be appropriate if next year all acting categories were made up of black actors, and people would start hashtags complaining that #OscarsSoBlack?

There is an honest discussion could be had if you think a certain black actor or actress should have been nominated this year. Like I said earlier, awards shows are subjective. There is always room for debating who is or isn't the best. If you are honestly concerned about who The Academy Awards constantly discriminate against, you need to start with comedies and genre movies. Also, their insistence of not nominating voice acting performances. (Seriously, the casts of Inside Out and Anomalisa should have nominated this year.)

Let's be honest. There wasn't really a great or note-worthy acting performance from black actors this year. There was no major snub. This controversy was brought up by people who are invested in political identity. Which I think is a racist philosophy that has caused more harm than good.

Well, if someone's offering a solution to a problem, I'm all ears, even if we're talking about how to make train tickets less expensive. Granted, this solution came from a stand-up comedian in the middle of his act, but I'm just happy to see people focused on solutions rather than problems.

 

[maninahat]

Did you actually read all the article, or just look at the graph?

I have. I have never said there was no underrepresentation of minorities in the oscars, I said there is no underrepresentation of black people, which is true.
That being said I don't really have too much investment in the oscars and I am not trying to defend them. I was mostly against your argumentation that one instance of something disproportionate happening is some kind of proof of racism.
If you however say something like: There's a disproportionately small amount of nominations for asian and hispanic minorities, I agree with you, since it is backed up by data.

I asked because the article specifically says this isn't the first time it happened. It is not a random, isolated occurrence. Also, even if you just go by the chart, the chart does show under-representation of black people. Not in nominations or roles, mind you, but in Oscars won and top roles. The article expounds on that too.

What are you talking about? Black people are clearly shown to have a higher percentage of Oscar wins than both nominations, roles played and population. If anything, they are being favoured for actually winning the oscars, not discriminated against.

Apologies, I got the "Wins" and "Nominations" the wrong way around. From the article (emphasis mine):

"Black actors get speaking roles in rough proportion to their percentage of America's population, according to a study of 600 top films from 2007-2013 at the Annenberg Center for Communication and Journalism. (See ?film roles? in the chart above.) Again, Latinos and Asians do much worse. But blacks are under-represented in the roles that count for the Oscars, getting just 9% of the top roles since 2000, according to our own analysis. (We define "top roles" as the top three names on the cast-list on IMDb, an online film database, in films with a rating of 7.5 or greater, an American box-office gross of at least $10m, and which were neither animated nor in a foreign language.)"

Edit: Concerning the "It's not the first time it happened". Yeah that's kindof how this stuff works. You will have some instances were black people have a much higher percentage than the percentage of population and you will have some instances were black people have a much lower percentage than the percentage of the population. It's what an average describes.

According to the article:
"...These years are far from the first whitewashing in Oscars history: no actors from ethnic minorities were nominated in 1995 or 1997, or in an extraordinary streak between 1975 and 1980. Throughout the 20th century, 95% of Oscar nominations went to white film stars...

...Could the "whiteout" be a statistical glitch? If the data were random, such a glitch would be hugely unlikely. A 2013 survey of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), an American union for film performers, suggests that 70% of its members are white. If all of the Guild?s members were equally likely to receive Oscar nominations, regardless of race, then over a two-year period 28 out of 40 nominations would be of white actors. The chances of no single person of colour being nominated across two ceremonies would be exceptionally small?even during a 15-year span, the odds of seeing at least one sequence of back-to-back whiteouts are around one in 100,000."

 

[Areloch]

Honestly, given that the 'OscarsSoWhite' thing seems to focus exclusively on black people, and from what I've heard, ignore the Latino and Asian actors and directors that DID get nominated(I hadn't looked up the nominations, but read other people talking about how there were non-black non-white nominations everyone was ignoring), the whole thing is stupid anyways.

Beyond that, this just strikes me as demanding quota'ing so that people's feelings don't get occasionally hurt when the subjectivity of an awards program gets in the way of their own personal biases of 'how they would have done it'.

Far better to ensure that minorities get pity awards rather than awarding them for actually being good, it seems. I'm sure the directors and actors would love having to wonder if they got a freebie for being black rather than actually the best at what they do.

 

[MrFalconfly]

You might have had a point if you didn't choose comic book characters whose race was already decided decades ago.

Those choices can be changed. Nick Fury was created as a white man. The first person to play him in a movie adaptation is David Hasslehoff. So was Johnny Storm, and so far as I can tell (though it can be hard to tell this based off comic book art), Quake is not half-Asian.

Except he's based on ultimate Nick Fury who is black in the comics before the films.

So your original point about them being "decades old comics" was moot in the first place - even the comics change.

IIRC "Ultimate Marvel" was basically a thought-experiment.

Basically, "Suppose those comics were never written, and we were the original writers writing the original characters".

So Ultimate Nick Fury, would by no means be the same character as Earth-616 (the original) Nick Fury, and therefore inu-kun's point still stands, for the simple reason that Ultimate Fury, 616 Fury, and 19999 Fury, are essentially three wildly different characters, who only share the same name and job description.

 

[Amaror]

According to the article:
"...These years are far from the first whitewashing in Oscars history: no actors from ethnic minorities were nominated in 1995 or 1997, or in an extraordinary streak between 1975 and 1980. Throughout the 20th century, 95% of Oscar nominations went to white film stars...

...Could the "whiteout" be a statistical glitch? If the data were random, such a glitch would be hugely unlikely. A 2013 survey of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), an American union for film performers, suggests that 70% of its members are white. If all of the Guild?s members were equally likely to receive Oscar nominations, regardless of race, then over a two-year period 28 out of 40 nominations would be of white actors. The chances of no single person of colour being nominated across two ceremonies would be exceptionally small?even during a 15-year span, the odds of seeing at least one sequence of back-to-back whiteouts are around one in 100,000."

I don't really want to argue about this anymore, since I have no personal opinion on how racist the movie industry is and or isn't but I have to just mention one problem with that last statement.
The economist itself says that the top actors are most likely to get nominated for oscars, yet it uses the ethnical proportions of ALL actors in order to measure the likelyhood that all nominees for oscars are white. Which is silly because there are plenty of actors in that estimation that don't have large enough roles to even have a chance to be nominated for the oscars. And if we look at the top actors on the chart itself, we see that 85& of top actors are white, which makes the chances that all nominees for oscars are white a lot higher than the 70% that the economist is working with. I would calculate the actual chance of consecutive oscar nominations being entirely white, but I would need the standart deviation of the data for that and I don't have that.

 

[SecondPrize]

You could always just point out that Academy membership doesn't change dramatically and these same apparent racists this year voted for 12 Years a Slave, Quvenzhan Wallis, Steve McQueen (the British one), Lupita Nyong'o, Barkhad Abdi and Viola Davis in recent years.

 

[Amaror]

My guess is that it would be difficult to find that data, since "Top actors" is probably a subjective statement. There are also all of the new, non "top" actors who get an Oscar break, and we need to know at what rate that tends to occur. This would actually be a somewhat interesting statistics side project, if someone were willing to furnish the data. We could probably agree to define "Top" by "Top grossing per film" or maybe "Audience Draw"? Possibly even some combinations of the two, weighing each according to the data.

Then, add the confounding factor of "breakout" stars, and how likely the Academy is to overlook an existing or new star in favor of another.

The thing is that the economist allready had a chart for the top actors. It was in their chart and they were roughly 85% white. Which is in my opinion the most likely reason for the skewed proportions of oscar nominations. Too few minority actors get hired for big roles in big movies. And if they do get hired, it's most often just the few faces that they know people like.

 

[kris40k]

All of you are missing the fact that this controversy is being trumped up to discredit this year's awards because Leonardo DiCaprio is finally going to win one for The Revenant.

Wake up, sheeple [https://xkcd.com/1013/]!

 

[Strazdas]

But... that's impossible to prove?

By what standard is it impossible to prove? Reasonable people can draw inferences based on patterns of behavior and be satisfied by them.

The Sscars are supposed to be the institution decision what is and isn't a good movie, so by definition it's impossible for them to pick bad movies because of bias because they are the ones deciding what is bad in the first place.

I don't remember saying that the Oscars are picking bad movies, so I'm not sure where that's coming from...but since we're on that topic, I remember Crash.

It's only a population-based problem if 23% of all characters in movies are not white--one in four, so if we only count team members, then at least two characters in the second Avengers movie should have been not-white, right?--and if non-white people get cast in "white" roles with the same frequency and lack of comment as the reverse.

Well one of them was a tree and another was a raccoon.

You have mistaken the Avengers for the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Unless we can read minds, we have no way of knowing why they chose that particular film or actor over another. since oscars are supposed to be the measure of whats good and whats not, there is no way of saying that they are not picking better movies without it being just your subjective opinion. and subjective opinion is NOT enough to claim existence of racism. Especially when the data show that in terms of representation, black people are represented more than their population amount.

I havent seen Crash, but it seems to be well liked movie by the general public. Once again it looks like you're translating "i dont like a movie they picked" into "They are racists".

You are correct, i mixed the two movies up.

 

[maninahat]

Ugh, racists sicken me. The thought that we even need to weigh race into the oscars because it's unfair if a competition is about acting and directing merits... I'll never understand these black supremacists and other morons who feel everything must be about their racism.

So we should conclude there weren't any good black actors in 2015?

Disproportionate here means not in proportion. If white people won 77% of the Oscars, and black people won 14% of Oscars, then it would be roughly proportionate to the US population. Instead we have a season were 100% of the Oscars go to white people. That's very disproportionate.

You did catch the bit about the Oscars being a recognition of good performance in film, and not an award given for 'blackness', right?

Also, nice etnocentristic thinking there. You do realise the US doesn't span the entire globe and there's other countries out there too?

I don't know what you are talking about. The discussion about a US show that gives awards to the US film industry.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Ugh, racists sicken me. The thought that we even need to weigh race into the oscars because it's unfair if a competition is about acting and directing merits... I'll never understand these black supremacists and other morons who feel everything must be about their racism.

So we should conclude there weren't any good black actors in 2015?

Of course, it's not racism, it's just that white people are obviously superior. If we stop complaining about injustice, it'll magically fade away.

 

[maninahat]

SNIP

1. Not really, it's a different universe witha different character, the original Nick Fury still exists as far as I know.

2. And how is having a big panel of judges who severely lack in diversity wrong? And like people mentioned with hispanics and asians unless we take a group of judges from the entire racial spectrum there will always be a problem of diversity.

3. But it's pretty obvious from favourism of certain genres over others that "celebrate an entire industry" is a pretty word to just "what the commitee likes".

1. That is a justification for why the writers redesign the characters. I don't think the films really care to explain which Universe it must be to explain why they cast POCs.
2. Because this happens. Unless you diversify the panel, this will continue to happen.
3. Agreed. Entire genres get snubbed because the crowd happened to not like sci-fi or fantasy movies much.

 

[JimB]

Unless we can read minds, we have no way of knowing why they chose that particular film or actor over another.

Is this in response to me asking you what standard makes proof impossible? Because if so, I think you should probably be spending your time railing against the injustice of any legal system that includes murder, terrorism, and rape among its list of punishable crimes, since those crimes are distinguished from the mere acts that are their base (killing is not the same as murder, for instance) by motivation: by the knowledge and intent the person committing the act had at the time the act was committed. By the standard you have laid out, it is impossible to know any person's motive with certainty--even the accused person's own testimony could be inaccurate to do aphasia or a simple misunderstanding of words or false self-representation--so no person should ever be convicted of these crimes, because I cannot read John Wayne Gacy's mind and prove that his intent was to cause the deaths of children. I can only prove that it happened.

Since Oscars are supposed to be the measure of what's good and what's not, there is no way of saying that they are not picking better movies without it being just your subjective opinion.

"Good" and "bad" are subjective opinions to begin with. If anyone's subjective opinion is invalid on the basis of subjectivity, then everyone's is.

I haven't seen Crash, but it seems to be well liked movie by the general public. Once again it looks like you're translating "I don't like a movie they picked" into "They are racists."

I did not say one word about Crash being chosen for racist reasons. Please reread the post you are responding to. You were talking about how the Academy is infallible because no bad movie could ever be nominated, so I chose a bad movie that got nominated and won.

 

[maninahat]

So we should conclude there weren't any good black actors in 2015?

What a strange question. Since when are oscars given to all 'good' actors instead of that year's best?

I don't know what you are talking about. The discussion about a US show that gives awards to the US film industry.

And during no time has it occured to you that people other than Americans could win oscars? The existance of non-American actors genuinely didn't even come to your mind?

Why does that matter?

On the topic of missing things...

2. Because this happens. Unless you diversify the panel, this will continue to happen.

Holy smoke, you just basically said the judges are unfit to judge because of their race, because in your argument, apparently white people are uncapable of comprehending the acting skills of non-whites.

Wow, just wow.... The complete disrespect for ethnic diversity, the vile racism underlying that reasoning is astounding.

An almost entirely white panel has an unconscious bias in favour of white actors and directors. Why does that sound odd to you?

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

The Academy Awards are a joke. They deliberately snub entire genres like fantasy and sci-fi because they're not artsy-fartsy enough for them. No amount of gender/racial representation is going to change that.

Honestly, the best course of action would be for everyone to ignore it completely until it fades into irrelevancy and ultimately disappears.

Because most of them Suck.

The Academy knows quality at least and would not give trash movies like Deadpool a nomination for best picture. They watch GOOD movies like There Will Be Blood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeSLPELpMeM

Lawrance of Arabia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPQ7CR3wn8A