‘Straight Outta Compton’ Producer Calls Oscar Noms “Embarrassing”

I shudder to think how much good that movie could have done if it had been given half as much visibility as “Philadelphia”.

This is the second consecutive year that the revered awards show has been all-white.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, once again, included no black actors or directors – prompting a dismayed revival of the “OscarsSoWhite” hashtag. “Straight Outta Compton, for example, is a great showcase for acting, with three appealing young leads, but maybe one single actor didn’t emerge for the Academy to rally behind”.

Straight Outta Compton was a box-office success this summer and made history as the highest grossing film with a Black director.

The Academy, whose first African American president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, articulated her “disappointment” that there was no diversity in the nominees, did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Stallone in the movie reprises his iconic role of boxer Rocky Balboa, for which he was nominated but failed to win an Oscar when the original “Rocky” came out in 1976.

While nothing major has resulted from the onrush of rage at the Academy besides bitter screeds and promises of ineffectual boycotts, the outburst over the Oscars’ lack of diversity is yet another sign of our chattering class’ obsession with fulfilling racially-specific quotas. And the Academy wasn’t insane about anything to do with Jackson’s or Smith’s films, including the contributions of the white people who wrote and directed them. It is an industry-wide situation and we need to continue this conversation. In our society, we value the idea of rewarding people based on their merit and quality rather than their background or skin color.

Will Packer, Straight Outta Compton’s executive producer isn’t too happy with the recently released list of Oscar Award Nominations.

Gil Robertson of the African-American Film Critics Association complained that it was “business as usual”. “We’ll have to try again”.

Will Smith and Idris Elba are among those who were snubbed by Academy voters, according to some commentators. Critical acclaim seems irrelevant to the rarefied grandees who draw up the nominations. With the exception of stand-outs such as Teyonah Parris in “Chi-Raq”, Gugu Mbatha-Raw in “Concussion” and Tessa Thompson in “Creed”, 2015 was a distressingly thin year for women of color (especially compared with their rich possibilities on television). In fact, it just makes him want to work harder.

Shut out of the Best Picture category as Pixar’s critically animated feature Inside Out (which was, of course, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film).

“That’s a huge success”, Berloff said, “and I hope we can really take the time to celebrate”.

Following Thursday’s [January 14, 2016] announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees, the public became more vocal than ever on the issue. The Academy Awards have a long tradition of rewarding performers and directors from every background, as well as making bad judgment calls on quality.

This photo provided by Universal Pictures shows, Aldis Hodge, from left, Neil Brown, Jr.

But it wasn’t just Straight Outta Compton that was overlooked by the Academy. I’d like to say that there were so many more talented actors who deserved to be nominated those years and that this year, there were other better films that deserved to be nominated before Beasts of No Nation .