On June 26, The Academy of Picture Arts and Motion Sciences (the people who put on the Academy Awards) invited 322 individuals, involved in multiple aspects of the film industry, to join their ranks as academy members. This new class of talented actors, directors, cinematographers, writers, etc. is not only significant because it is the largest group of invitees in the group’s history, but also because it is one of the most diverse classes the Academy has ever extended membership to.
It’s about time.
An analyst working for the Los Angeles Times reported, “that more than 23% [of the people asked to join this year] were people of color and more than 28% were women.” Some of the 322 invitees this year who were apart of the initiative to diversify the Academy included Kevin Hart (Actor, The Wedding Ringer), Song Kang-Ho (Actor, Snowpiercer), Malcolm D. Lee (Writer/Director, The Best Man Holiday), and Elizabeth Banks (Actress, The Hunger Games).
Looking at a report of the 2013 Oscar voters, 93% were Caucasian while 76% of voters were male. The Academy has been slow to bring about change to their elite group, as their past invitation rates have been approximately equal to the number of members who have died, retired, or resigned, leaving the Academy to maintain their selective size and their stigma for discouraging minorities.
Why is it so important that the Academy, and Hollywood as a whole, must look to diversifying their members? Simply put, if you write (and create) what you know, than most of the media that is consumed by the public represents narrow viewpoints of life, being predominately from the white male perspective. With a lack of diversity both onscreen and behind the scenes, cultural misrepresentation and stereotyped caricatures would be considered the norm, instead of complex, dimensional characters that showcase the depth of their culture and humanity.
A great step forward was taken this past year by many major television studios that looked to diversify their primetime line-ups. For example, ABC added Fresh Off the Boat, Blackish, and Cristela to their Fall 2014/Spring 2015 line-up. (However, Cristela was unfortunately cancelled, ending after one season.) The CW created the comedy Jane the Virgin, for which it’s leading actress Gina Rodriguez won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series- Musical or Comedy. FOX also created the massive hit drama Empire, which was quickly renewed for a second season.
Where television has attempted to take a step forward, the film industry has sadly always been many steps behind. Looking at casting decisions of recent films, Hollywood executives have made the decision to cast generally Caucasian actors in minority roles. For example, Jake Gyllenhaal was selected to play the Middle-Eastern protagonist in The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Johnny Depp was given the Native American role of Tonto in The Lone Ranger, Emma Stone played a character who was a quarter Chinese and a quarter Hawaiian in Aloha, and Rooney Mara was cast as the Native American princess Tiger Lily in the upcoming movie Pan. With so many minority roles in large-budget, big studio films going to actors who are not of the same cultural identity, it is disheartening to see Hollywood fail to recognize the talented minority actors and actresses as people capable of effectively playing these roles and earning the studios the big dollars that they hope to gain with their more popular, “safer” choices.
Continuing to look at films, the other minority who suffers both onscreen and off is women. According to research conducted by San Diego State’s own Dr. Martha Lauzen, in 2014, only 12% of the top 100 films of the year had a clear protagonist who was a female. Female characters also tend to be younger than their male counterparts, as the majority of women are portrayed in their 20s and 30s while most males are depicted in their 30s and 40s.
Mindy Kaling stated in an interview with Parade magazine, “I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?”
Out of the female characters in films, 74% were White, 11% were Black, 4% were Latina, 4% were Asian, 3% were of other descent, and 4% identified as other. Offscreen for 2014-2015, “… women accounted for 26% of directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors, and cinematographers working on domestically and independently produced feature-length films (documentaries and narrative features).”
These cultural depictions are so important, because those who are subjected to heavy media use begin to accept the depictions of different groups of people as the norm of society. If you were to watch countless hours of a TV show that showed people you identify with being attacked by circus people every episode, eventually you would begin to see circus people in the real world as dangerous. Now lets say instead of circus people, it is people of minorities who would be playing these villains. How much more fearful and unaccepting of diverse cultural groups would our society become?
With The Academy of Picture Arts and Motion Sciences taking steps to change their future by diversifying their members, it is an encouraging step towards a promising future. However, this step is still a small one in comparison to how far Hollywood needs to go in order to become more inclusive of minorities. This process of change is not going to happen overnight, but it is a process we must be patient for. As the film and television industry looks to differentiate its members, hopefully the entertainment empire will open its doors to a range of new people with fresh ideas who will be able to provide us with diverse, identifiable subjects worth watching.
