This time a decade ago, we all gathered around our laptops or smartphones and cackled. Real hard. We shared the tweets that made us laugh the loudest in our group chats, and some of us tried to figure out how to join in on the fun.
“#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” April Reign, the hashtag’s creator, tweeted in 2015.
We laughed because it was funny. We laughed harder because it was true.
Reign’s tweet was in reference to the Academy Awards — which airs this Sunday on ABC and Hulu — and was poking fun at the all-white lists of nominees that flashed on screen, and the lack of people of color who weren’t included.
In a year that gifted the cinematic world Ava DuVernay’s Selma, many awards watchers assumed that, at the very least, we’d hear David Oyelowo’s name called. He’d so brilliantly channeled the familiar Southern cadence and drawl of Martin Luther King Jr. Even though he’s British, Oyelowo transformed into MLK. He transported us back to 1965 when Selma, Alabama, became a battleground in the fight for equality.
It was a beautiful film and a sharp reminder of how far we’d come — and that bit of history wasn’t exactly all that long ago.
DuVernay knew what she had. She screened the film for some of us before it was released, and I acutely remember emailing her an all-caps message of kudos the second I got back to my hotel room, adding she’d have to change her phone number. I also remember a white colleague turning to me as the credits rolled on the film and saying, “Oh, she knows what she has.”
It was that good.
And because of that, some of us dared to dream that DuVernay – who very quickly became a toast of the town by the time her film arrived in theaters on Christmas Day in 2014 – would join that exclusive sorority known as Women Directors Who Have Been Nominated For an Academy Award.
But none of those things happened. Instead, we saw a stridently white stream of actors and actresses — both in supporting and leading roles — rack up nominations.
However, when those hashtagged tweets caught fire — the last one funnier than the one before it, all in rapid-fire succession — we laughed so hard.
We laughed until we stopped laughing.
And then, things got activated.
So, two things can be true at the same time.
We can effectively point out a lack of diversity, a lack of creative work going underacknowledged and a long history of not paying attention to stories that aren’t mainstream narratives (read: white), while also not taking away from the work that should be celebrated alongside of it.
That particular season, I enjoyed Eddie Redmayne’s performance in The Theory of Everything and Michael Keaton’s portrayal in Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Redmayne devoured his role as the brilliant and awe-inspiring Stephen Hawking, and Keaton? C’mon, man. I loved, loved, LOVED the work Keaton turned in as a washed-up Hollywood actor. I am fortunate enough to work with ABC News to help cover the Academy Awards, and one thing I find myself saying every time it applies is how much Hollywood loves seeing films about itself. Voters eat that up. Academy members love it when an actor and a director bring to life a story that feels so familiar to the industry that’s literally judging the work — whether that means a fictional portrayal as in the case of Keaton’s movie that year or a nonfiction film on a legend like Lucille Ball (2021’s Being the Ricardos) or Steven Spielberg, who gave us a film loosely inspired by his own life with 2022’s The Fablemans.
I inherently understand what voters love and I’m a pretty good prognosticator of what might be nominated and what might win. I have to literally turn my ears off when I overhear people say things like “OMG! That trailer is so amazing! This film should absolutely win an Oscar!” Nah. That’s not how this works.
Alongside my fellow critics and reporters and, yes, voters, I screen hundreds of films each season to try to figure out and vote for which ones should be considered the best of the bunch.
Most times I’m pretty spot on.
Sometimes I’m wrong, like 10 years ago.
Before 2015, we didn’t know a lot about the voting body — we actually still don’t. We don’t know how many voters there are overall and we don’t really know their demographic makeup.
Sure, we know some voters, but that’s largely because of #OscarsSoWhite, which essentially became a call to action. At the time, Cheryl Boone Isaacs was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the first African American and only the third woman to hold that title – and it almost seemed criminal that she had to absorb the growing criticism about the Academy.
The voting body didn’t just become problematic when she was elected in 2015, but she decided to do something about it and grow the voting base, bringing in more women, more people of color, and getting some younger voters in the mix. There had long been a voting cap on membership and Boone Issacs worked to have it removed, which allowed her to announce who the new voters would be. And each year people marveled at who was just now getting a seat at the table, stunned that they hadn’t been invited to that party years before the press release announcing their arrival went out.
To the surprise of no one, Oscar voters were predominately white and male. And Boone Isaacs, who said the Academy was already trying to get a handle on its diversity problem before the hashtag went viral, led the way to help change that.
Progress was made. She was able to grow the voting body — doubling both the numbers of members of color and women — and we started to see some shifts, even though most of us still work under the assumption of how the membership has traditionally moved over the years.
By the time we got to the 2017 award season, we saw a shift. That year, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight won for Best Picture – yes, that crazy mix-up with La La Land happened. It was also the year that we finally got to see Viola Davis straighten her crown and grab one of those heavy statuettes for her work in Fences (where Denzel Washington also was rightly nominated). Mahershala Ali collected a win for Moonlight and we saw talents like Ruth Negga, Octavia Spencer and Naomie Harris also earn nominations. Howard University alum Bradford Young made history as the first Black cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi hit, Arrival. ESPN was a big winner in 2017 with O.J: Made In America, the ambitious multi-part documentary about the literal “trial of the century,” which was directed by Ezra Edleman and took home the award for Best Documentary Feature. (And if you’re keeping tabs, DuVernay got her Oscar nomination that year for her impactful documentary The 13th).
So were the #OscarsSoBlack that year? It sure felt like it.
But I don’t think the original hashtag nor the conversation it sparked was ever meant to talk about solely Black folks. It was an opportunity to address the constant misses that the industry and the voting bodies (of which I’m a part of several) seem to not have a handle on. Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Indigenous people and more weren’t being invited to the highfalutin party, but they deserved to be there because their stories mattered.
The very real argument is that this conversation has to happen long before we fill out voting ballots. It has to happen in the rooms where projects are greenlit and budgets are set for storytellers to go forth and deliver remarkable cinematic experiences.
And then, we need to make sure these diverse stories are being appropriately marketed so that folks like me get to say things like, “The voters are loving this film that tells this unknown story” about something we all need to know about.
Thankfully, we’ve seen some progress in the last 10 years – and we can celebrate that. Truly. I was sent down a rabbit hole after watching the traumatizing but very well done film Killers of the Flower Moon, the gripping and painful story of the Osage tribe that not enough of us were aware of. And its lead actress, Lily Gladstone? Forgetaboutit. We also got to cheer on Chloe Zhao, who became the second woman and the first woman of color to win Best Director for Nomadland in 2021.
There’s been incredible growth, yes.
And yet, the Oscars are still so white.
So we keep watching. And we continue being loud and right when we point out which projects are missing from the conversation. And from the nominations.
A decade later, I feel pretty good about where we are, though there is still a lot of work to do. Colman Domingo is a certified star; he’s received back-to-back nominations for Best Actor — last year for Rustin, a biopic on civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and this year for Sing Sing, a film about an arts-based prison rehabilitation program. Zoe Saldana is very likely going to pick up an Oscar for her fine work in Netflix’s Emila Perez, and Cynthia Erivo is a Best Actress nominee again, this time for the wildly popular musical Wicked. We also all got introduced to the cinematic boldness of director RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys).
Hollywood can do better. Because it has to. The work we see in theaters and on streaming needs to do a better job of telling the full scope of stories.
#OscarsSoUniversal? Not yet. But that’s the goal. And maybe one day soon, we’ll get there.