It was the hashtag read round the world. “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” quipped lawyer and activist April Reign on January 15, 2015. She was tweeting about that morning’s Academy Award nominations — more specifically, about the fact that every one of the 20 actors recognized across four categories was white. Reign’s criticism would catch on quick, those three words spreading like wildfire across social media. Slower was the Academy to respond; it moved with the speed you might expect of an organization ambling towards its 90th birthday.
It all might have blown over if AMPAS didn’t once again fail, the very next year, to nominate a single performance by a person of color. One year of exclusively caucasian actors competing for the gold could be a glitch. But two, consecutively? That’s a pattern. The Academy had to face the music, which had grown louder than the kind it used to play rambling winners off the stage: The Oscars were so white — and as a close look at its voters revealed, so old and so male, too.
We’re now a decade out from Reign’s truth bomb and the backlash her hashtag inspired. Two cycles of bad press were enough to convince an embarrassed Academy that, yes, it had a diversity problem, which of course reflected a much larger problem in the industry and culture. (But wait, didn’t a past Oscar winner, Crash, solve inequality?) The solution to a rather demographically… homogeneous voting body was a major recruitment drive. AMPAS even set concrete goals for itself: By 2020, it would double the number of women and people of color in the organization. “The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up,” said president Cheryl Boone Isaacs in a statement.
From a pure numbers perspective, this initiative has been a success. The Academy is objectively less white, male, and old today. It’s doubled its membership since 2015 — and in the process, met those ambitious growth goals. AMPAS isn’t just more inclusive. It’s also more cosmopolitan. In looking to shake up the makeup of its ranks, the group looked beyond Hollywood, and beyond the borders of the American film industry. Artists outside the States now account for at least 20% of the membership of this increasingly international group.
As the 10th anniversary of #OscarSoWhite passes, it’s worth asking: Has the diversification of the Academy also diversified the awards? More so than not, it’s helped. Since the PR nightmares of 2015 and 2016, we’ve yet to see another all-white slate of acting nominees. Which is not to say the Academy hasn’t come close to repeating that dubious feat yet again: In 2020, they made room only for Cynthia Erivo’s work in Harriet. And that same year was one of a couple from the past few when the Best Director lineup was made up entirely of men.
But on the matter of representation, there have been signs of progress, too. This past decade has seen historic nominations or wins for Muslim, Korean, Afro-Latina, Vietnamese, Native American, and Indigenous Mexican actors. Chloe Zhao became the first won of color (and only the second woman, period) to take home Best Director. And the 2019 ceremony could have been nicknamed #OscarsNotSoWhite, judging from the number of major awards that went to non-white performers and filmmakers — all leading up, ironically, to the bestowing of Best Picture upon a vintage white-savior movie, Green Brook.
That movie’s retrograde victory aside, the Oscars have undeniably gotten hipper over the last decade, too. It’s hard to imagine the “old” Academy handing Best Picture to Moonlight, a sensitive, poetic, low-budget character study about marginalized Americans, or to Parasite, a deranged culture-war farce from across the ocean. The nominations also paint a picture of a more adventurous membership: From the meditative three-hour Japanese drama Drive My Car to the formally radical anti-drama The Zone of Interest to the obscenely bonkers body-horror of The Substance, traditional notions of an “Oscar movie” no longer much apply. Chalk that up, perhaps, to the number of great filmmakers invited to join the Academy over the previous decade. (In 2017 alone, the list grew to include Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Jessica Hausner, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Takashi Miike, Mohammad Rasoulof, Johnnie To, and Athina Rachel Tsangari.)
Expanding the umbrella of the Academy has done wonders, in other words, for the collective taste of the organization. The Oscars have, on average, rallied behind better movies since the membership expanded and diversified. Whether that’s helped the flagging ratings of the ceremony is another matter. The internationalizing of this annual American awards show makes for an easy scapegoat when tracking the downward decline of viewership. Will people tune in to watch a bunch of films they haven’t seen or even heard of pick up a skew of awards? At times, there does seem to be an inverse relationship between the sophistication of the nominees and the Nielsen appeal of their televised celebration.
On the other hand, the loosening grip the Academy have held over the public imagination predates any social-media reckoning over its lily-whiteness. In other words, the Oscars have been hemorrhaging viewers for ages. In fact, the decline is one reason the Best Picture lineup was expanded past five in 2009: As the argument went, more slots would allow for more blockbusters and better ratings. If anything, the Oscars have been kinder of late to tentpole attractions. No awards ceremony that makes room for Black Panther, Top Gun: Maverick, or Barbenheimer can be said to be ignoring populist hits at the expense of art-house chores.
What’s clear, from the vantage of 2025, is that diversifying the Academy has done more than admirably expand the award-season tent for artists of different backgrounds and cultures. It’s also diversified the kinds of movies that win Oscars, widening the range of achievement that Hollywood’s most prestigious club honors. With more voices came a vaster range of tastes — one that’s reached from the arthouse to the multiplex over the past decade of rapid internal change. That’s yet another argument for the impact of #OscarsSoWhite: When it comes to both people and the movies they make, variety really is the spice of life.
The 97th Academy Awards will air on ABC and stream on Hulu on Sunday, March 2, 2025. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
