The Diversity Battle in Hollywood

Within an hour of the Oscar nominations the following Monday, The Hollywood Reporter had two stories commenting on the lack of diversity at the Oscars (here, here) and commented on it in a third while highlighting the general theme all day on their blog and Deadline took 75 minutes to indict the Oscars for the same thing. The Daily Show did a piece on it the issue that night and The LA Times released a house editorial that the Oscars are still white and male the next day. Since the counterfactual #Oscarsowhite campaign in the 2015–2016 Oscar cycle, the Oscars have become one of the most hyper-policed litmus tests of whether Hollywood is meeting arbitrary benchmarks set from by an entertainment media that’s rampantly consumed with identity politics. The movie industry and these Oscars deserve better headlines than this.

The predominant story line among this school of cultural writers whose take on film criticism can no longer be divorced from activism is that Hollywood has had a long history of failing three groups: racial minorities (defined arbitrarily as “people of color”), women, and people on the LGBQT+ spectrum. As such they owe it to three groups in the present to rectify decades of injustice.

This year there was one Hispanic actor (if you want to classify him as European because nominee Antonio Banderas is from Spain, try telling that to his agent and look at how pigeonholed he has been in his career) and one black actor among the twenty nominees. The other chief complaint was that Greta Gerwig was not nominated for “Little Women” in the…