Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

No, George Clooney, the Oscars aren’t racist

George Clooney is absolutely right: The Oscars don’t look like America. So what?

Following up on Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith’s vows to skip the Oscars this year for being too white, Clooney implied in an interview this week that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was racially prejudiced because this year’s crop of major nominees included no blacks. (All 20 of those nominated for acting awards, for instance, were white).

“If you think back 10 years ago, the Academy was doing a better job,” Clooney said. “Think about how many more African-Americans were nominated.” (By “African-American,” Clooney meant “black.” He would not have chided the Academy for failing to choose any ‘African-American’ nominees if Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o and Chiwetel Ejiofor, none of whom are American, had been nominated.)

“I think around 2004,” Clooney said, “certainly there were black nominees — like Don Cheadle, Morgan Freeman. And all of a sudden, you feel like we’re moving in the wrong direction.”

Clooney cited “Creed,” “Concussion,” “Straight Outta Compton” and “Beasts of No Nation” as films that “could have been nominated” but weren’t, implying that racial bias is the reason they weren’t.

Yes, all those films (two of which flopped) could have been nominated. But is it reasonable to infer that the Oscar voters snubbed them in a fit of racial pique?

Great films and indelible performances get left off the list all the time, every year. “The Shining” didn’t get any Oscar nominations. Nor did “Groundhog Day,” “His Girl Friday,” “Mean Streets,” “Modern Times,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Reservoir Dogs” or “The Searchers.” Every film ever made has been “snubbed” for Best Picture, except for the handful that connected with Oscar voters at the exact moment they were filling out their ballots.

All of a sudden, you feel like we’re moving in the wrong direction

 - George Clooney

Clooney was off by a year, but a number of blacks were nominated in 2005 — five of the 20 acting nominations went to black actors that year. But that year is simply a reminder that if you’re only looking at a tiny sample size of 20 people, it’s ridiculous to expect that group to match up closely to the demographics of the entire United States.

No blacks were nominated for acting Oscars this year, or last year. But the membership of the AMPAS doesn’t change much from year to year. Is Clooney saying that the same people who were not racist when they gave the Best Picture Oscar to “12 Years a Slave” turned racist 10 months later for some reason when they “snubbed” Ava DuVernay by not nominating her for Best Director for “Selma”?

Were they racist the whole time but decided to pretend not to be racist in March of 2014, only to stop pretending in January of 2015? And how does all this square with Clooney’s famous Oscar speech, in 2006, when he said, “We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while, I think. It’s probably a good thing. We’re the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular”? If he’d like to retract those remarks, this is his chance to do so.

As Oscar voters born in the 1920s and 1930s have steadily died out and been replaced with new members born in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Emma Stone, Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo were invited to join last year), why would the group as a whole become more racist?

If Clooney expanded the sample a bit — say, to the last 15 years — he’d find that the number of black actors nominated for Oscars in that period is 29 out of 300, or 10 percent. The black proportion of the population was 12 to 13 percent in that period.

What’s most striking about the demographics of Oscar nominees is not the percentage of blacks, which is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, but the percentage of foreigners, which is off the charts. Ten of the 20 actors nominated this year were born outside the US, five of them playing Americans. Over the past 15 years, about 110 of the 300 acting nominees were born outside of the US.

Maybe there’s an anti-American bias among Oscar voters. Or maybe Kate Winslet keeps getting nominated because voters think she’s one of the very best at what she does.