Oscar night: The whitest awards event ever?

The “whiteness” of this year’s Oscars promises to be a “little blinding,” said Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott in The New York Times. For the first time in memory, there are no people of color among the nominees for any of the top individual awards, and the contenders for Best Picture are themselves virtually all-white affairs. Those 10 films take us into the lives of “British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks,” and a clan of blue-collar Boston boxers—every one of their worlds racially homogenous. In what was “perhaps the whitest year for Hollywood” since the mid-1980s, it’s hard to write off 2011’s awards night as just an anomaly. Could it be that in tough economic times, stories about nonwhite Americans have been pushed aside by a new interest in class?

The problem runs deeper than that, said Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. Hollywood may think of itself as a bastion of liberalism, but even though seven different African-American actors have won Oscars in the past nine years, the “cold truth” is that the movie business remains “one of the most minority-free industries in America.” If there’s no person of color “in the room where the decision-making happens,” the earnest but commercially risky kinds of movies that become Oscar contenders aren’t likely to include many nonwhite characters. “Hollywood is usually impervious to embarrassment,” but maybe this Oscar night will cause its VIPs to think twice about the image they’re projecting to the outside world.

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