This year’s Academy Awards nominations have been the whitest Oscars since, well, last year.
Filmmaker Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett-Smith decide to boycott the Oscars by not attending or even watching it from home. Lee announced his boycott on Instagram in a lengthy post on Jan. 18 stating:
” How is it possible for the second consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are all white?”
Pinkett Smith announces her absent from the Oscars on a Facebook video. In the video, Pinkett-Smith stated:
” At the Oscars… people of color are always welcomed to give out awards…even entertain, but we are rarely recognized for our artistic accomplishments.”
Pinkett-Smith and Lee boycotting against the Oscars have drawn attention to the Academy’s lack of diversity. Even the Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs spoke out on the missing diversity at the awards. In a statement on Twitter, Isaacs addressed the issue first hard:
“The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership. In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond.”
The host of the Oscars, Chris Rock, has even nicknamed the Oscars “The White BET Awards.”
Although many have lauded Lee and Pinkett-Smith for their decision, there have been criticisms of their stance. Janet Hubert, most known for her portrayal of Aunt Viv on “The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air,” criticized Pinkett-Smith’s stance, saying that the Smiths are just as unfair as Hollywood for the simple fact that they have their own production company and choose to only produce for their family and friends:
“You ain’t Barack and Michelle Obama. And y’all need to get over yourselves. You have a huge production company that you only produce your friends and family and yourself. So you are a part of Hollywood, you are part of the system that is unfair to other actors. So get real.”
Regardless of whether folks agree with Lee’s and Pinkett-Smith’s stance or not, talk of boycotting the Oscars will continue to emphasize the value of racial parity in entertainment, and make us wonder why it still seems so far away.
Featured image is by Prayitno, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Sharealike license.
