A little over a month from now, the world’s most rich, famous, and talented people will put on their Sunday best and pat each other on the back for being the world’s most rich, famous, and talented group—and not to mention the whitest.
Last week, when I first heard about the public outrage directed at the Oscars I rolled my eyes. How many times does there have to be a huge public outcry before they’ll learn? My first thought was that I should simply not care about the award show—something I’d been doing pretty successfully up until now anyways.
But, I thought, surely the problem runs deeper than that. The Academy can’t just be a group of white supremacists huddled in a boardroom somewhere gleefully plotting another year of whitewashed nominations. And they can’t really be so stupid as to think that after all the years of criticism they’ve received, this would be the year that entirely white nominees would be okay. (Okay, they’re a little stupid.)
In Aziz Ansari’s show Master of None, he breaks down the problem of typecasting. His character, an Indo-American actor trying to break into the big leagues constantly faces the struggle of only ever being cast for stereotypical Indian roles. In one audition, he is asked to do an Indian accent, even though he is very much American. If members of certain races are still most commonly cast into stereotypical roles, like the Indian convenience store owner trope, it creates a huge barrier for diverse actors to gain traction as main characters.
In the show, as Ansari tries to get a production company to cast him as their lead, his character receives the excuse that a cast without a white person simply wouldn’t be relatable enough. It’s this mentality that’s led us to the state of the Oscars as they are today, but it doesn’t stop there.
While typecasting, a lack of diverse roles, and diverse casting are certainly all problematic, they stem from a history of ethnicities other than white people being excluded from the entertainment industry, particularly in Hollywood. Ever since Hollywood’s conception in the early 1900s, if a script called for a racially diverse character, instead of having someone actually representative of that race, a white actor would play it in blackface. This trend is unfortunately not a thing of the past.
Just this month, a play in Vancouver called The Motherfucker with the Hat is being highly criticized for casting non-Latino actors when the script specifically identifies three of the characters as Puerto Rican. And remember in 2010 when Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s white, was cast as a Persian prince? The movie is literally called Prince of Persia, but apparently all of the Iranian actors were too busy being typecast as terrorists.
You might think, Okay, that sucks, but it’s the Oscars, not real life.
Maybe, but the cultural phenomenon of the award show is an example of the state of our society at any given moment. The aristocratic, upper-class elite of Hollywood are a showcase of the political turmoil and social issues of the day. From the #AskHerMore campaign to Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent Golden Globe speech about Indigenous people, celebrities are starting to politicize these events.
The point is that no matter how vain and superficial the Oscars might seem, because of the millions and millions of people whp watch and idolize them each year, they should matter to all of us. And while the Academy itself has some serious work to do in making its nominations more diverse (there were several great diverse films snubbed this year), this shouldn’t be something that is yelled about for one or two months every year, and then forgotten. The fight for equal representation is ongoing, and Hollywood should be reminded of this.
