Oscar-Winning Black Actors Get Honest About Inequality and Race in Hollywood

The 2016 Oscars are nearly upon us! “The Revenant” is up for best picture, DiCaprio is up for Best Actor and Brie Larson is in the running for Best Actress. Self-serious prestige films have long found a ready seat at the Oscars, while films starring or directed by minorities have struggled to.

In my review of “The Revenant” this week, I pegged Leonardo DiCaprio as the almost-guaranteed victor of this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.

The action flick received 10 nominations total, including Best Picture.

Lifetime achievement awards will go to actor Will Smith and legendary producer Norman Lear, who produced the sitcom, “The Jeffersons”.

“The nomination process is essentially run by, dictated by money and public relations maneuvering”, Mortensen says.

“I’d like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year’s nominees”. The SAG Awards are a great indicator of what’s going to go down at the Academy Awards, and Leo won for The Revenant there, so we’re crossing our fingers it’s a good prediction!

In recent years numerous big awards have been a foregone conclusion well before the big night, but this year numerous big categories have been less easy to predict based on the awards shows leading up to the Oscars. Because since this was supporting and not lead, I figured I could probably manage it.

After the nominations for acting failed to recognize a single person of color, sparking a national conversation and reviving 2015’s hashtag about racial inequality in the film industry, Rock reportedly scrapped his plans for the opening monologue and canceled all press interviews, including a profile in The Hollywood Reporter.

African-American actor and director Don Cheadle, who was nominated in 2005 in the best actor category for his performance in Hotel Rwanda, joked with Rock that he was attending the evening as a valet.

While the statistics for black women are harsh, it’s really no better for black men in film, either.

In fairness to DiCaprio and Inarritu, pretty much everyone came in for a drubbing this year. If it wasn’t, Melissa McCarthy would have an armful of Oscars by now. Secondly, his biggest threat stat-wise – Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, the Screen Actors’ Guild award-winner, and Golden Globe and Bafta nominee – isn’t a contender. The Mexican director won a year ago for “Birdman”. Yes, there are only white people nominated for Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, but there is still diversity.

The Oscars are less about rewarding the best films than affirming Hollywood’s sense of itself – which is why exclusion so outrages.