The Patriot Post® · The Oscars' Political Agenda Problem

For the second year in a row, no actor of color has been nominated to win the top prizes of the Academy Awards: the four awards honoring the efforts of Hollywood’s actors. As a result, director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith, both black, said they would boycott the Oscars. Black comedian Chris Rock, who is supposed to host the awards, is facing pressure to drop out and also join the protest over the lack of diversity for the Academy’s top awards.

National Review’s Jay Nordlinger offers two solutions: First, allowing the academy to do it’s thing, to make the judgments on what it thinks are the best examples of acting in the past year. The other is to institute quotas, mandating that black actors are guaranteed spots. Both are unpalatable if the goal of the Academy Awards is to recognize the most laudable art shown on the silver screen.

As Hans Fiene writes, Hollywood is caught between one social justice cause, giving out awards to a diverse field of filmmakers, and another:

> “But giving awards to people of color is currently the Academy’s second-favorite thing in the world. Its favorite thing is giving awards for performances in movies about upper-class 1940s lesbian college professors who bravely battled both unjust banking practices and homophobia — bonus points if they were persecuted by political or religious conservatives, double bonus points if they worked in Hollywood, and triple bonus points if they existed in real life.”

If the Academy Award truly wanted to be diverse, it would focus on recognizing the best art. Then, excellent filmmakers of all stripes — black, Latino, conservative, Christian — would have a chance at being recognized.