Reasons/blame for Whiteout 2?

[The Original BJ]

And, to extend it to the Picture/Director races of the last decade and a half:

Best Picture nominees with predominately non-white or racially diverse casts:
Selma, 12 Years a Slave (winner), Captain Phillips, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, The Help, Precious, Slumdog Millionaire (winner), Babel, Letters From Iwo Jima, Crash (winner), Ray, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Traffic.

Best Picture nominees with at least one major diverse character:
The Hurt Locker (winner), The Blind Side, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, No Country for Old Men (if you consider Spanish "diverse," which I know is debatable), Million Dollar Baby (winner), Chicago (winner)

Diverse Best Director candidates:
Ang Lee (3 times, with 2 wins), Pedro Almodóvar (again, if you consider Spanish), Fernando Meirelles, Alejandro G. Iñárritu (3 times, with one win, and maybe another pending), Lee Daniels, Alfonso Cuarón (winner), Steve McQueen, and of course, Kathryn Bigelow's historic win for female filmmakers.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying there isn't progress to be made, or that everyone should just accept what representation they get and not complain. BUT...I think the argument that the Academy isn't trying in this department just doesn't seem totally fair.

[OscarGuy]

Beasts of No Nation was always a long shot for any nominations. With their insistence of a day-and-date release strategy, Netflix may have been facing backlash from the studios. I'm surprised the Academy doesn't have a rule against day-and-date releases since this is supposed to be about theatrical motion pictures, not streaming ventures. Releasing to theaters as a token gesture to meet Academy release requirements is a sneaky and dishonest approach. If they want to play with the big dogs, then they need to play like the big dogs.

[Mister Tee]

1) rob9802, you give the impression of being intelligent and having something to offer this community. But I'd prefer you to make the gesture of actually posting here, rather than linking to your blog. I didn't click on your link to get your thoughts because i don't follow such links. Dig in here; you'll be welcome.

2) I hate this whole discussion because so many people come with pre-determined positions -- whether it's "we know AMPAS is racist/homophobic; how can we change it?" or "quit your whining; they just vote for what they like best". And, of course, I approach it warily because I'm in that most-mistrusted demographic, aging straight white guy, whose opinions are viewed by many as automatically suspect.

I'll co-sign pretty much everything BJ said. Straight Outta Compton was a movie that would never in a million years have become an AMPAS favorite; only its outsize gross even brought it into the conversation. Creed certainly got solid reviews (reviews mystifying to me), but as the 7th entry in a franchise is no more baffling an omission than Skyfall. Idris Elba is the one black candidate who would have been eminently deserving, but best supporting actor was a demolition derby that seemed to resolve itself by choosing one long-time veteran and four actors attached to best picture nominees.

Leaving out Selma/Oyelowo/DuVernay last year offered a far better argument that the Academy has problems in that area -- though, even there, you had the bizarre factor of the studio seemingly sabotaging the film by making it unavailable to so many at the Guild screener stage.

These two years coming back to back seem on the surface to indicate on ongoing issue. But sometimes superficial is misleading.

Perhaps I'm more skeptical on this issue because I'm old enough to have encountered it before. In 1995, there were no African-American acting nominees, and Jesse Jackson led an earlier version of this current protest, calling for a boycott of the Oscars to highlight the fact. And it struck me as opportunistic then, because, in the three years leading up to 1995, there'd been two such nominees each year -- Denzel and Jaye Davidson in '92, Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne in '93, Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson in '94. (If you're thinking, two nominees out of 20 isn't much...well, 10% is pretty much the African-American percentage of the US population.) You'd have thought this accumulating record would have granted AMPAS a little credit to get through a year with no such nominees, but, no, it seemed that, for many, life had only begun on that nominations morning.

I see a somewhat similar thing happening now. Over the decade or so preceding last year's nominations, people of color -- especially African-Americans -- have often done extremely well in the field of acting nominations. If you also considered other non-Caucasian races, the nominations were more diverse than they'd ever been, sometimes well in excess of the population percentages.

Here's the breakdown, with black performers listed first (and, yes: it can feel loathsome to break things down solely by race like this -- but that's what much of the outcry is insisting on):

2003: Djimon Hounsou the only black candidate, but Keisha Castle-Hughes, Benicio Del Toro, Ken Watanabe and Shohreh Aghdashloo make for quite a varied line-up (I leave out Ben Kingsley, only because he's been around so long many probably view him as more British than Asian)
2004: Don Cheadle, Jamie Foxx twice, Morgan Freeman, Sophie Okonedo, plus Catalina Sandino Moreno in there for Hispanic representation
2005: an off-year; Terence Howard alone
2006: the bumper crop. Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Djimon Hounsou, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, plus Penelope Cruz and Adrianna Barrazza carrying the Hispanic flag and Rinko Kikuchi getting a rare Asian acting nod
2007: Ruby Dee, with Javier Bardem "por Espana" (per his acceptance speech)
2008: Viola David, Taraji P. Henson, plus Penelope Cruz
2009: Morgan Freeman, Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, plus Penelope Cruz again
2010: no black candidates (first time in ten years), but Javier Bardem and Haile Steinfeld (though possibly many voters saw her as Caucasian)
2011: Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, plus Demian Bichir
2012: Quvenzhané Wallis and Denzel Washington
2013: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Barkhad Abdi, Lupita N'yongo

No one's expecting medals to AMPAS for selecting such a diverse group -- but is it too much to ask that, when a year like this comes along where the slate is all-white, there not be such an immediate jump to "they're a bunch of old racist quacks"?

Of course, let me quickly add that there are many areas of Hollywood that are still way too dominated by Caucasian males -- front offices, the directing chair, craft guilds (costumes excluded) for a start -- and I fully support all efforts to make them more diverse. But I think concentrating on this tiny group of subjective opinions rendered by a limited number of voters actually distracts from that primary goal.

[nightwingnova]

I'm going with Viola Davis' position.

The only non-Anglo performer or director seriously touted during the precursors was Idris Elba, not favored and in a movie unlikely to get much more attention; so his absence was barely noticed.

Oooppss...Inarritu...mustn't forget him. There is a Hispanic on the roster.

[Okri]

If Mad Max was filmed with a largely black cast and didn't get nominated, I presume we'd be saying that it's not AMPAS bait and presuming that was the reason, though,

[ksrymy]

Don't blame Oscar - blame the studios for not taking chances on people of color in films that don't specifically have to do with people of color.

If no people of color are nominated, AMPAS is racist. If they nominate a couple, they're token nominees. If they nominate several and none win, AMPAS is racist. It's impossible to win the internet outrage game.

[The Original BJ]

In my opinion, this is a very complicated situation that is the result of a genuine issue in the industry -- a real limitation of access for filmmakers of color as well as roles for actors of color -- that has been grossly reduced to some sort of racist plot by a monolithic Academy to keep out people of color from receiving awards.

A lot of people in my personal life have been very angry about the Oscar noms -- and I am certainly in agreement that they reflect an industry which is struggling to provide decent opportunities for people of color -- but the thing is, my ballot wouldn't have been THAT much more diverse. I certainly would have included Idris Elba, possibly Benicio Del Toro, depending on how I ended up resolving that bountiful Supporting Actor category. But after that? No one. That isn't to suggest that there weren't other non-white actors doing solid work this year -- I'd say Michael B. Jordan would fit into that camp -- but to get a spot on my hypothetical ballot you have to be one of the FIVE BEST of the year, and people seem to be woefully ignorant about just how competitive that is in any given film year.

And when I read Tweets that suggest that in a year with Straight Outta Compton, Creed, and Beasts of No Nation, there's no reason something more diverse shouldn't have been in Best Picture, my personal response would be that I personally don't think any of those movies are especially great, and if that's all you've got, that's the problem. There just aren't that many options out there featuring diverse casts, and if the limited few just don't strike a chord in any given year, there will be a white out. And frankly, none of those movies strike me as typical Academy bait -- A film about the origins of an early hip-hop group? The umpteenth movie in the Rocky franchise? A violent film about child warriors (that wasn't screened in most real movie theater chains because it simultaneously aired on Netflix)? (In this context, Selma's poor showing actually strikes me as a far better example, simply because it is more in line with what the Academy typically likes -- triumphant historical dramas.) But I just really resent the implication that if you don't think those movies merited inclusion, you're racist and out-of-touch. (And again, I was super bummed Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo missed out last year.)

But putting even those movies aside, some of the candidates people are proposing that COULD have been included strike me as insane. When people bring up something like Tangerine, my first response is, you think a movie shot on an iPhone is going to get major Oscar nominations? That's just not an argument based in reality. And my second response is, can you tell me with a straight face that you thought Kitana Kiki Rodriguez -- basically an amateur actress in her first movie -- gave a performance on par with Cate Blanchett and Charlotte Rampling, two of the world's greatest actresses in some of the finest parts they've ever had? And Rodriguez isn't even one of the more ridiculous choices being offered up. It just seems to me that offering up lists that basically amount to "actors of color who were in movies this year" is tacitly arguing for a quota system regardless of the merits of the performance, when so few of these performances would ever come into serious conversations about what constitutes the "best" acting in any given year.

I really don't mean to come off as insensitive or offensive -- there is a REAL issue here, but as Viola Davis said, you can't win an Emmy (or in this case, an Oscar) if the parts aren't there, and I don't see that much use in tar-and-feathering the Academy for myopia when that has so little to do with actually starting to get more diverse stories told on film. And, at the end of the day, the Academy is a bunch of individual members just voting for what THEY like -- how exactly do people expect to solve the "problem" of convincing those people to like different things than they like?

[rob9802]

I'm curious to find out what you guys think the reasons are for the second straight Whiteout among nominees.
My thoughts can be found on the link below, but I'm curious to see what others think the reasons are.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/movieboobs ... n-analysis