Michelle Yeoh was selected on Tuesday (24th January)
for an Academy Award for her lead role in independent flick Everything
Everywhere All at Once. This Malaysian Chinese actress is the very first women
of Asian descent ever to be nominated in the Best Actress category (when discounting
Natalie Portman who has U.S. and Israeli citizenship). Despite the fact that
this milestone has received extensive coverage, there have also been voices condemning
the lack of Black Best Actress nominees this year, showing that eight years
after the hashtag #oscarssowhite, the argument about diversity at the Academy
Awards is still ongoing.
Observing the nominations in the Oscar's Big Five categories since the #oscarssowhite controversy, Best Actress is the category where the least Black, Asian and Latin American people (or those with a matching family background) have been nominated. The selected figure is just seven out of 40. Even Best Actor category ids not far behind and lies at eight out of 40 nominations. This includes last year's nomination and win by Will Smith for his role as the father and coach of Serena and Venus Williams in the sports drama King Richard.
The most prestigious category considered at the Oscars in general
is “The Big Five” sand grows slightly more diverse in the categories Best
Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (both adapted and original). Best
Director saw 11 nominations in the given time frame, including the nominations
and wins of Chloé Zhao for Nomandland, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite, Alfonso
Cuarón for Roma and Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water between 2017 and
2020. This year, the director duo of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel
Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, is nominated in the category and could snag another
win with Asian-American participation.
This is a fact that this share of Oscar nominees does not
reflect the demographics of the United States and serves to underline the
minority standing of non-white voices in the movie industry led to the
#oscarssowhite movement in 2015, which gained better pull in 2016 after the
Academy allegedly failed to address the concerns voiced by advocates of this
movement. The concern that the movie industry does not reflect general society
has also been supported by research. For example, according to a study by the
University of California, 26 percent of movie writers and 25 percent of movie
directors had a minority background in 2020, while the group of people with
singular Hispanic, Latin American, Black or African American backgrounds alone
comprised 31 percent of the U.S. population in the same year.
One group that is mainly absent and is not talked about at
length is actors, directors and writers with a distinctly Arabian background.
In 2021, for example, only two films by Arabian filmmakers were nominated,
Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin and The
Present by Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi. In 2018, Egyptian-American
actor Rami Malek won Best Actor for his role as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian
Rhapsody.
Infographic by: statista
