Oscar Observations

The Academy Awards have managed again to stir up the diversity controversy.  The dispute and talk of a boycott is all over the news.  Last year I commented on a similar fuss pointing out that the Academy Awards show is really just one long commercial to sell movie tickets, that one or two years without a nominee of color had to be considered against the 16 years in a row prior to last year, and that those with good perspective understand that the issue of entertainment awards should be small potatoes when it comes to setting priorities in real life.  In the end, this is just a bunch of narcissists crying about not getting the attention they crave.

Then I asked myself, what about diversity in other areas?  Doesn’t the lack of diversity in the NBA, for example, teach us something?  Last season 74.4% of NBA players were African American and 23.3% were white.  The reason for this apparent imbalance is that fans reward their teams for winning basketball games.  Generally, those teams with the best players and the best teamwork win the most games, go to the playoffs, and rake in the big bucks from ticket sales, team apparel and television.  The sport is objective.  Whoever scores the most points wins.

Best movie (or actor), on the other hand, is not objective.  It’s a case of preference or opinion.  Maybe there are underlying prejudices, but like any category in the arts these days, it is very subjective.  In addition, the best picture voting process is complicated, and it is very possible that the winner isn’t even the one with the most first place votes.  (In case you are curious, here is a brief explanation of how it works.)  So the meaningfulness of advertising a movie as best picture is greatly diminished.  But either way it’s still no big deal.

In doing the research, though, I learned something even more surprising.  Diversity does not mean what I always thought it did.  It doesn’t mean a range of different perspectives or backgrounds or experiences at all!  The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport gives the NBA an A+ rating for diversity.  This is how they explain their calculations:  “Currently, 24 percent of the U.S. population is comprised of people of color, thus an A was achieved if 24 percent of the positions were held by people of color. A position was determined to have earned a B if people of color held 12 percent of the positions, and a C was earned if people of color held only 9 percent of positions.”  (By “position” they mean player, front office, coach, owner, etc.)

So all people of color represented 76.6%, which is more than 24%.  That equals an A+.  One would assume from the above concept of diversity that the curve would go down on both sides from the 24%, that too many would be as bad as too few and cause diversity to start to diminish.  The more people were alike, the less diversity.  Since that is clearly not the case, this organization has a different definition; and if there were no white players at all, the diversity grade would still be A+.  (Regular readers know from my other posts that I don’t buy a definition of diversity that relies on skin color.  You can’t walk into a room and see into people’s heads, but that is another topic.)

So before we get too excited about lack of diversity in Hollywood, we should probably decide whether everybody agrees on a single definition.  I guess we need to mix everyone together by some formula, which is easy to do when the whole exercise is subjective anyway.  The alternative would be to treat everyone the same – but that might mean having only a single category for best actor and best supporting actor, not splitting into male and female categories.  Wow, that would open up another can of worms!

Oscar Hype and Protest

There is another controversy in Hollywood!  The celebrity news from CBS reveals:  “Not a single person of color was nominated for an acting Oscar…the first time that's happened since 1998.”  Yahoo financial news tells us that as a result of this lack of appreciation, the Reverend Al Sharpton has announced that he is calling an "emergency meeting" next week to address the issue.

Looking at this from the aspect of the key dimensions, many questions come to mind.

From a perspective point of view, it reflects on the importance we place on the entertainment industry.  With recent terrorist activity in Paris and Belgium in the past few days and other real international and domestic problems, is this what CBS considers more real news?  If that is the case, they must assume that the readers and viewers of CBS are well out of touch with reality to move this Oscar hype to the top of their priority list.

From a responsibility point of view, here comes the Reverend Sharpton swooping in to create another set of victims that he can save by holding an emergency meeting.  It seems like he can’t concentrate on one problem long enough to see it through, jumping from one crisis or public slight to the next.  In the future will Black actors wonder when they become nominees or winners, was I really that good, or was I nominated just to keep the protests down and portray Hollywood as fair, open-minded and inclusive?

Critical thinking elicits a slew of questions.  If they consider 10 different movies for either Best Picture or Best Lead/Supporting Actor Male/Female and if only one stars primarily African-American actors, what is the probability that no nominations will be of African-Americans?  (That one I can answer: about 19% or roughly 1 in 5.)  In light of that answer isn’t it more unusual that this is the first time since 1998 – 16 years in a row – that it has happened?  By pure chance it would have happened less often.

More questions involve the implied racism of the people who run Hollywood and who nominate and vote on actors for the awards.  Are they really racist or are they in the business of giving us, the viewing public, the kinds of shows and stars that we are willing to pay to see?  They should be getting more desperate and calculating to do this since “2014 was the worst year for movie attendance since 1995.”  If they saw a chance to make more money and increase attendance and did something else due to their prejudices, wouldn’t it be like a Black quarterback refusing to throw to a White receiver who was wide open in the end zone?

Does even the implication that the Oscars could be driven by a prejudice among the voters strongly imply that the whole thing is pretty subjective – that it’s a matter of taste?  Are the real racists the ones who look at the color of the nominees rather than at their talents, or is this again just a matter of taste with no objective criteria?

The final question is why the public can’t see through this whole Oscar business as one big promotional campaign to get everyone to tune in to a television show and to attend more movies.  All the singing, speeches and jokes are really just one three-and-a-half hour commercial.  Now, watching commercials is not necessarily bad.  Some are very amusing.  Some people watch the Super Bowl primarily for the commercials, but they know that behind the entertainment someone is trying to sell them something.  The same is true of the Oscars, but disguised as a series of genuine awards, awards with no apparent objective basis, complete with the sealed and guarded envelopes to add to the suspense – just more show biz.  But everyone takes it so seriously.