#OscarsSoWhite: Hollywood negligent of minorities?

Recent poll shows 34 per cent of respondents feel film industry has a problem with women, actors of colour.

LOS ANGELES: In a year when lack of diversity among Academy-Award nominees prompted the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, one-third of Americans believe Hollywood does not pay proper attention to minorities and women, according to the annual Reuters/Ipsos Oscars poll.

34 per cent of the nearly 2,000 people who polled online said they believe Hollywood has a general problem with minorities, and 32 per cent said the film industry’s capital shies away from making Oscar-calibre movies that appeal to minorities. Nearly 62 per cent of ‘black’ respondents said Hollywood had a problem with minorities, compared to 48 per cent from all minority groups.

How women are treated fared only slightly better overall, with 32 per cent of respondents saying Hollywood has a problem with women, and 29 per cent believing it fell short in making Oscar-calibre movies for the female audience. But women were only slightly more negative than men when asked about women’s standing in the film industry. 28 per cent of men and 30 per cent of women thought Hollywood under-delivered on Oscar-quality movies for women.

The findings come a month after nominations revealed no actors of colour in the four acting races and no women in the best director and screenwriter categories for Sunday’s Academy Awards, in what experts deemed as “the whitest Oscars” in years.

The most controversial exclusions centered around Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr biopic that secured best picture and best song nominations but failed to earn nods for its female African-American director Ava DuVernay and lead actor David Oyelowo. REUTERS

Published in The Express Tribune, February 20^th,  2015.

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