Are The Oscars Racist?

So often people just accept the above statement as fact. We all know it used to be true, but is it anymore? I thought it might be interesting to test it out by looking at the races of Best Actor/Actress nominations since 1990. Theoretically, if our society and the Academy were truly race-blind, the percentages should be close to those race's percentage in our society. I expected to find most racial groups still underrepresented, but wondered if blacks actually might be overrepresented of late.

In my results I was kind of right and kind of wrong, but was overall surprised at how white the nominees were. Blacks have received 7% of the nominations (while being 12% of the population), Latinos 1% (while at 14%), and Asians 0% (while at 4%). Black males are doing the best, having 11% of the nominations and 12.5% of the awards (although 33% of their nominations and 50% of the awards were for Denzel). They are also doing better lately, with 17% of the nominations and 33% of the awards in the new millenium. Black women are not doing so hot though, having only been nominated 2.5 % of the time. Which means Tom Hanks has as many nominations and one more Oscar than black women.

Hispanics and Asians though are really being left behind. The Hispanic population has been changing recently, so you can't fully expect their number to be equal, but it still surprised me that they've only had 2 nominations and no victories over the last 16 years (and one of the nominations was for a foreign movie, so I'm not even sure if that really counts in what I'm looking at). I also did not expect to see Asians at zero.

I was also curious how racial stereotypes affected acting roles. In particular, if black males were more likely to be cast as criminals. This became more complicated than I expected. I mean, Malcolm X had been in jail, but that's not really why he was famous. And although the Hurricane was incarcerated, the whole movie was about how that was unjust; so it seemed strange to use it as evidence to prove racism. I also didn't want to have to go through all the white roles and decide who was really a "criminal". So I gave up on that venture even though I'm sure there was some truth to what I was looking for. But what I did notice in the beginings of that search, was that almost all of the black nominees were based on famous people. When I counted them up (Malcolm X, Ike, Tina, Hotel Rwanda Guy, Ali, Ray, Hurricane) it came out to 64% of the black nominees. This was compared to 19% of whites. I'm not sure exactly what that meant (lack of interest in regular minorities? Lack of black writers writing real characters), but thought it was notable.