LOS ANGELES –The Oscar nominations on Tuesday honoured the largest ever crop of actors of colour along with a diverse range of stories, a year after Hollywood was slammed for excluding minority talent.
The #OscarsSoWhite controversy last year was sparked when all 20 acting nominees were white for a second consecutive year.
The hashtag highlighted a larger issue within the film industry, where talent and stories of diverse communities can be hard to get made or are not pushed for awards recognition.
This year, #OscarsLessWhite was trending on Twitter as each acting category featured actors of colour: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis for Fences, Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris for Moonlight, and Octavia Spencer for Hidden Figures.
Loving star Ruth Negga, of Irish-Ethiopian descent, and Lion actor Dev Patel, who is British and of Indian descent, were also nominated.
“It shows that in front of and behind the camera, the stories are not homogenous, so I’m heartened that the faces and genres that’ll be in that (Oscar) room in 33 days’ time reflect a film industry that I work in, that isn’t a homogenous place,” Moonlight director Barry Jenkins told Reuters.
Although whimsical musical romance La La Land led with a record-tying 14 nominations, Moonlight, about an impoverished black boy grappling with his sexuality landed eight nods.
The acting nods follow the success of Hidden Figures, about three black female mathematicians working for NASA in the 1960s. The film also landed a best picture Oscar nomination.
The film grossed $84 million at North American theatres and topped the box office for two weeks, dispelling industry notions about minority actors not drawing mass audiences.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, host of the annual Oscars, overhauled its membership last year, pledging to double membership of women and minorities by 2020 and stripping some older, non-active members of voting privileges. (Reuters)
