It is the 88th Annual Academy Awards and Hollywood still has a diversity issue.
Leading up to the Oscars this past Sunday, many wondered if this particular stigma would be addressed. Sure enough, host Chris Rock, started his witty monologue with sharp quips associating the award show to “White People’s Choice Awards.” The trending hashtag now has a page called @OscarsSoWhite that posts videos and images to convey the issue:
https://twitter.com/OscarsSoWhite/status/703588261034242048
Just how many? The unique hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has over 444.7k mentions on Twitter alone. This is only counting the number of times the hashtag has been used, not the amount of times the topic has been brought up either through social media or interpersonal conversation.
How far was the reach? Given that the Academy Awards are predominately an American pastime and the issue of diversity is concerning Hollywood, the greatest number of mentions was in the United States. Coming in close second was Canada and then Mexico, which comes to no surprise considering how close they are to the U.S. geography wise. Rounding up the list are predominately white countries, mostly European, which is interesting based on the fact that @OscarsSoWhite talks about a lack of diversity…
What did they talk about? By looking at the word cloud and buzz graph the most notable words are “oscars,” “nomination,” “white,” and “black.” These key words are fairly standard when talking about the oscars category or any type of diversity issue.
It is notable, however, that no big names in particular were mentioned. This leaves me to believe that the movement is not focused on targeting individuals, but rather the system as a whole itself.
What was the most retweeted tweet? Joy Reid, the author of ‘Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide,’ tweeted out over a month ago her concerns of the upcoming Oscars:
#OscarsSoWhite black people can't even get nominated for the movies about black people… https://t.co/3ZM9y09R7b
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 14, 2016
“Creed” and “Straight Outta Compton” both got one nomination each, but for white people…
By: Erica Halverson, Griffin Psaila, Kelsey Adams