Moviefan555 had nuggets of truth in his first post. Problem is he was far more interested in being a troll then an actual discussion. I mean if he had actually READ the thread he would have found people who thing the #Oscarssowhite controversy is BS, but he insisted we all were PC a-holes. And I (and many others here) are by no means PC. And since his douchebaggery will not stand man... he won't be missed either.
They were nuggets, alright, but not of truth. It seemed especially ignorant of moviefan555 to act like Sean Penn and Jared Leto winning Oscars for
Milk and
Dallas Buyers Club (plus Eddie Redmayne being nominated for
The Danish Girl) were supposed to indicate that the Academy was not prejudiced even though, you know, all three are cishet white males and thus their receiving recognition for playing such "brave" roles is fundamentally hollow.
Also, who takes pride in not being PC?
#OscarSoRight
Screw black people! White power! White power!
I know you're joking and all, but damn.
On a serious note I think all this is bullsh*t, to a certain extend. Looking at Oscars through the years, black people aren't represented nearly enough. Of course that's obviously because of more dominant racism in the earlier years.
But many black people have been nominated and won awards in the '00s and up, even the 90s... But I don't think 2015 is the right year for this to be a big thing. Idris Elba could have gotten a nomination, definitely, but apart from that I think it's all stupid. Not every race and every sexual orientated group has to be nominated just to create some diversity. The discussion has a point somewhere, but all this has been overblown and just appear dumb as hell right now...
It certainly seems like the right year. If anything, the fact that there's been an increase in nominations/wins since the beginning of the 21st century only makes the fact that there have now been two consecutive years without any acting nominees of colour even more egregious. Trying to reference just how many black people have won or been nominated in the past isn't enough to off-set matters, especially considering the stats I already used when moviefan555 deployed the exact same line of reasoning.
I don't think most people take issue with the idea that racism is real and can manifest in things like this. They take issue with the assumption that a lack of diversity, in any sample size in any industry, should be treated as de facto evidence of same.
It becomes an issue if it looks like there's a pattern emerging, which is the case when there just so happens to be two consecutive lots of all-white nominees. That's why this year's criticism of the nominees has escalated into a more significant boycott - one time could be an anomaly, but twice in a row is a little harder to accept. Things aren't helped by the Academy trying to shrug this off through their host's jokes (such as NPH's "best and whitest" crack at last year's ceremony).
Example one: even if the nominations were random, you'd occasionally have years where all the nominees would be white. So any suggestion that this is itself dispositive is basically innumerate.
I'm not sure how such a field could be randomised anyway, let alone what effect it would have on the probability of all the nominees being white. Without a definite amount of nominees from which to create a representative sample size, there's no telling how often you'd end up with an all-white array of nominees. For all we know, "occasionally" could end up being a gross underestimation, but without concrete data to build off, examining probabilities like this feels fundamentally pointless.
Example two: there's no reason to expect any group of people to participate in any industry at a rate that mirrors their numbers in the larger population. It's also self-contradictory, because expecting this is the same as suggesting that all races' life experiences are roughly interchangeable, which can't be true if racism is at all prevalent (let alone systemic).
Why not? What if it's the systemic racism itself that is preventing people of colour from making sufficient headway in that industry in the first place? If that's what needs to be dismantled in order for people of colour to provide even an approximate reflection of their overall numbers within the general population then people probably shouldn't be so quick to disregard or even defend allegations of misrepresentation.
It can be argued, of course, that what fields people enter in what numbers is part choice, but also partly a reflection of how welcome they feel there. But if that's what's going on, I would ask two things. First, how someone thinks they can parse one of these causes from the other. And second, why it makes sense to fix this from the top-down, by culturally policing the end result.
Yeah, correlation does not equate to causation and all that. If nothing else, the decision to start inducting new members from a wider variety of backgrounds can at least be seen as an experiment to either prove or disprove any inherent biases on the part of the Academy's current members. Besides, fixing things from the top-down is arguably the most pragmatic way to resolve such a perpetually steep uphill struggle - and who's to say the Academy isn't responsible for doing cultural policing of its own?