By Solé Scott
Editor-In-Chief
The Oscars will host their 98th ceremony on March 15, and to be honest, I hope it is their last.
The ceremony has been notorious for not sufficiently awarding Black actors compared to their white counterparts.
It is a travesty that Halle Berry is still the only Black woman to win Best Actress back in 2002. The Academy Awards were first held in 1929, and since then, only one Black woman has won this award.
Another academy farce: only four Black men have won Best Actor over the years. That brief list includes Sidney Poitier in 1964, Denzel Washington in 2002, Jamie Foxx in 2005 and Forest Whitaker in 2007.
89 white males have won the prestigious award, while 96 white women have won.
I am so disturbed by this statistic; that an awards ceremony recognized for excellence in cinema is completely biased and underrepresented.
Astonishing is an understatement; we are still failing to make progress, as the award show premieres in less than a month, leaving this debate still looming.
This Black History Month, I have been watching films that shaped not only my life but culture as well. Films such as “Malcolm X,” “Boyz n the Hood,” “Hidden Figures,” “The Color Purple” and “Eve’s Bayou.”
One of the films that blew me away was “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” starring Angela Bassett. I researched whether Bassett won an Academy Award for the film, and no surprise: she did not. In fact, she lost the Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 1994 ceremony to Holly Hunter for “The Piano.”
Fast forward to 2023, Bassett again lost to Jamie Lee Curtis in a controversial win for Best Supporting Actress.
I want to acknowledge other communities as well that are massively underrepresented, such as members of Hispanic, Indigenous, Middle Eastern and LGBTQ communities, as well as women in non-acting roles.
The Academy Awards are stuck in a time where winners are still predominately white, straight and male.
Their mission, according to their website, is to connect audiences from around the world through films that the academy recognizes for their excellence.
This mission needs to be thrown out because it has nothing to do with the reality of who wins.
A movement on social media called #OscarsSoWhite spanned from 2015 to 2016, calling out the Oscars for their lack of diversity. In both years, all 20 nominations went to white actors.
In 1988, Eddie Murphy famously called the Academy out onstage.
The segment was meant to be funny with loud discomfort, but also a stark reminder that the Academy turns a blind eye to the serious issue.
“And I’ll probably never win an Oscar for saying this, but hey, what the hey – I gotta say it. Actually, I might not be in any trouble because the way it’s been going is about every 20 years we get one, so we ain’t due to about 2004. So, by that time, this will all be blown over,” Murphy said.
I don’t believe the upcoming Academy Awards will be any different, as change has already been slow for almost 100 years.
I just want the academy and all its voters to put their money where their mouth is and actually live by their mission statement. Real commitment is investing in diverse storytelling and not predictable Hollywood social norms.
