The list of nominees for the Oscars 2016 was announced this afternoon, and didn't take long to attract fierce criticism from film fans. The problem? An almost total lack of black, female and LGBT faces in this year's main categories. Despite films like Carol, Creed and Straight Outta Compton rampaging to critical and commercial glory over the last 12 months, this year's shortlists feature largely films by - and about - straight white men.
It's an issue because, whatever you make of the Oscars, their impact on the film industry is massive. Who gets hired, how much they get paid, what kind of movies get green-lit and developed - the Academy has a huge hand in these things. The message a whitewash list of nominees like today's sends is that people from minority backgrounds and their stories just plain old matter less.
That's a dangerous message to send out to such a vast audience in an age of cranked racial tensions in the US. Some 36.6 million Americans tuned into last year's awards according to ABC, making it one of the most-viewed events in the western pop culture calendar. The Academy, in the wake of Black Lives Matter and continuing debate over civil rights in the States, probably have a responsibility to do more.
It was a problem last year (leading to ridicule on Twitter, with #OscarsSoWhite quickly trending) and it's a problem again in 2016. Not convinced? These five eye-opening facts about the lack of diversity on this year's list of nominees might change your mind...
1. All 20 of the acting nominees competing at this year's Oscars are white.
Last year was the first year since 1998 that not one black actor was deemed worthy of a nod across any of the Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress categories. We'd love to see Leonardo DiCaprio collect the Best Actor prize that has so long eluded him, don't get us wrong.
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But was there really not room for Michael B Jordan in that category, after bringing both power and pathos to his anguished boxer in Creed?
2. The Best Picture contenders are all directed by men.
White guy gets marooned on Mars (The Martian). White guy gets marooned in the wilderness (The Revenant). Bunch of white guys talk about breaking the economy (The Big Short). Yep, there's a recurring theme threaded through this year's Best Picture noms, perhaps unsurprisingly given - whaddayaknow! - they're almost exclusively directed by white men (Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican-born director of The Revenant, is the sole exception).
That said, there are some stories which aren't exclusively about men - take Room, Brooklyn and Spotlight. But with any luck, Mad Max: Fury Road will go home with the gong - at least George Miller's film, with its take-no-shit leading lady Furiosa, has a feminist feel.
3. The few nominated films about black and LGBT issues? It's mostly straight white men getting recognition for them.
Straight Outta Compton was an adrenaline rush of hip-hop excitement, about a rap crew who blew a crater in US pop culture with incendiary songs about black struggle. The film's only Oscar nod, however, is for the all-white team who wrote the screenplay (including one woman, Andrea Berloff). NWA fans, to whom Ice Cube, Dr Dre and co were civil rights pioneers in their day, are understandably disappointed.
On a similar tip, Eddie Redmayne's Best Actor nom for his starring role in The Danish Girl as Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender confirmation surgery, is likely to stir further protests from the LGBT community, many of whom felt the movie should have cast a trans actor as Lili.
See also: Sly Stallone's nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Creed, a movie packed with brilliant performances from rising black stars.
4. From Creed to Carol, the Academy had plenty of other options.
You could sort of understand if it'd simply been a quiet year for films by black or female directors. 2015, though, was a progressive year at multiplexes. Straight Outta Compton - astutely directed by black filmmaker F Gary Grey - grossed more than $200m worldwide. Todd Haynes's lesbian drama Carol was one of the year's biggest critical smashes, with a current Rotten Tomatoes rating of 94% fresh.
Ryan Coogler, another black director, turned in a whip-smart drama disguised as a sports film in Rocky sequel Creed, to similar critical acclaim (so much so, he's just been handed the keys to Marvel's Black Panther). In other words, the Academy had plenty to choose from, had they wanted to make their shortlists even the slightest bit more diverse.
5. It's a problem the Oscars refuse to address.
The worst part of all this is - the same accusations were levelled at the Oscars last year. In fact, we wrote practically the same piece this time last year. There's a depressing familiarity to the way movies by and about minority people have been overlooked in the Oscars 2016 nominations. It's not about tokenism, it's about change - and it drastically needs to happen next year.
