It has only been seven months since Sinners made history for Black cinema at the Oscars, winning four of its record-breaking 16 nominations, including Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan) and Best Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler). But we are now, yet again, anticipating a potential Oscar season with virtually no people of color recognized in top categories. Is this a sign that the Academy is moving backward in its efforts to expand and diversify its membership and hopefully, by extension, its list of nominees?
Let’s consider Gold Derby’s current predictions in the top eight categories. Of the Top 10 films projected to be nominated for Best Picture by our experts, all are led by white actors (or subjects): The Odyssey, La Bola Negra, Wild Horse Nine, Project Hail Mary, The Debut, Dune: Part Three, The Invite, You Can See Everything, I Play Rocky, and Artificial. All directors projected to be nominated are white. All but one of the 10 Best Actor and Best Actress contenders in nomination position are white; Inde Navarrette (Obsession) is the exception. Only two people of color are represented in supporting categories: Tao Okamoto (All of a Sudden) for Best Supporting Actress and John Leguizamo (The Odyssey) for Best Supporting Actor. All but two credited screenwriters are white; Rashida Jones (The Invite) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden) are the exceptions there.
Activist April Reign originated the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015 in response to a slate of acting nominees that was entirely white. That was the year of films like The Theory of Everything, Whiplash, The Imitation Game, and Best Picture winner Birdman. The Martin Luther King Jr. docudrama Selma was nominated for Best Picture as well, but was notoriously snubbed from every other category except Best Original Song, which the film ultimately won.
#OscarsSoWhite had an encore in 2016 when there were only white nominees for acting awards in a year dominated by such films as The Big Short, The Revenant, Room, and Best Picture champ Spotlight. No films in that year’s Best Picture race were fronted by people of color, though Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu did claim his second Oscar in a row for Best Director following his victory for the aforementioned Birdman.
These controversies came three years after the bombshell Los Angeles Times report that revealed that Academy membership was overwhelmingly white and male. Since then, the organization has made efforts to rectify that. After the report, the Academy almost doubled its membership to over 11,000 by 2025, with women representing 33% of the membership and people outside the U.S. comprising 24% of members.
And we saw proof of those changes in many of the nominees and winners, like the queer- and Black-themed Moonlight, Korean-language Parasite, and Asian-led sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of which won Best Picture. Two women have won Best Director since the Academy’s changes were undertaken: Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), the first woman of color to claim the prize, and Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog).
Other films with predominantly nonwhite casts have made strides, like Best Picture nominees BlacKkKlansman, Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, American Fiction, Past Lives, Emilia Pérez, and Nickel Boys. A 2023 USC study bore out the significant gains made by women and people of color, “although the Academy is still far from achieving parity across the 19 categories examined by USC Annenberg researchers,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
It’s still early in the awards season, of course, so it remains to be seen how the actual nominations will play out in January. A lot can change between now and then. But scrolling down the experts’ current rankings of Best Picture hopefuls, the highest film with a person of color in a leading role is 11th-ranked Obsession starring Mexican American actress Inde Navarrette. In 17th place is the Korean film Possible Love, followed by Behemoth! starring Chilean actor Pedro Pascal in 18th. There are no other POC-led films backed by the experts so far, so if there is a surge of diversity in this race, it’s hard to see where else it might come from at this vantage point. Perhaps a Zendaya surprise for The Drama or Dune, or both? Maybe Misty Green breakout star Rosalind Eleazar? Or the Nigeria-set Mrs. Dalloway adaptation Clarissa?
So what does it mean that this year’s Oscar race is shaping up to be another relative whitewash? Have the Academy’s efforts been all for naught? Not necessarily, but we should consider the broader political context. 2020, in addition to throwing the awards industry into chaos due to the COVID pandemic, was a watershed moment for racial justice. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked uprisings across the globe. But the subsequent years have been marked by backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across industries, from the Pentagon to Target. Now there is less pressure on businesses to proactively court underrepresented groups. In fact, there is significant pressure from the very top of the federal government not to court underrepresented groups.
To paraphrase Viola Davis’s Emmy speech for How to Get Away With Murder, you cannot win an Oscar for roles that are simply not there. So the Academy is still a work in progress, yes. But you could turn it into the queerest, multiracial, multi-ethnic, international polycule collective on Earth and still get #OscarsSoWhite if the movies that get financed, released, and promoted are still overwhelmingly white and male.
Actor-director Andy Serkis recently commented about the lack of diversity in his upcoming Lord of the Rings film, The Hunt for Gollum, “I don’t think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film. So, it’s [casting] where relevant, basically.” Is that philosophy representative of Hollywood decision-makers writ large, and not just in the Academy? Would Sinners even get made at today’s Skydance? Get your hashtags ready. You might need them.
