Well Informed, Racism 2.0.

Looking into the topic of racism which unfortunately for our society is still a topic of much prevalence and the notion behind racism is still heavily present amongst many levels. A very hot topic that is being brought to the forefront of every social media channel is that the Oscars are to white and that blacks and minorities are underrepresented by the academy. Here we are in 2016 and ideas like this are still being presented and debated among our society essentially fueling the fire for racism to continue. This started when director Spike Lee came out and said that he was going to boycott the Oscars because of the lack of diversity among the nominations. Is the academy being prejudice against minority actors or is there a lack of worthy performance by these actors? These are the roaming questions that are being debated heavily within our social medias. As I researched some of the nominations and films that were up for awards this year I did find them to have a heavy dosage of white actors and writers who are representing the films. So yes essentially a call to action may be in order to find ways to represent more actors who fall under the minority category but calling others racist well this is starting to sound like 1960 again. Racism however is a little bit far for some of these well respected actors to be throwing around at other groups or actors. Over the past two years there hasn’t been a single black actor nomination and I do see this to be quite alarming because I can think of a handful of movies and actors that very well could have received a nomination. As I looked over this year’s categories and films I really only saw one or two actors or films that could have received nominations. One of those being Will Smith and his performance in the movie Concussion where he takes on a role of a doctor from Africa where he adopted an African accent to play the role which I thought was a phenomenal performance. And wouldn’t you know it Will Smith is at the forefront of this boycott because he didn’t receive a nomination. Films like Straight Outta Compton who only received a nomination for screenplay has all of its black actors getting no nominations but besides Jason Mitchell’s performance as Eazy E none of them in my opinion even had Oscar nominating performances. So again is it racism or is it a lack of qualified performance? The Oscars are the biggest awards in the film industry it takes a lot to receive a nomination let alone winning the Oscar in general just ask Leonardo who has done years of amazing work and never received the award. The Oscars have been predominately white over the last two years this is very true not one minority has received a nomination which is surprising to me to say the least. However, in 2014 the movie “12 Years a Slave” which already has a noticeable racist background behind the plot of the movie and had a very heavy African American cast, won best picture with an African American director, as well as winner for best supporting actress who wouldn’t you know it is also African American. Where was the call to action in 2014 and now everyone is saying the academy doesn’t recognize black actors? That was only two years ago and now here we are up in arms saying they get no recognition seems pretty unfair to me. When it comes to the idea of racism it is easy to play the he said she said or point fingers or put the blame elsewhere. But when we see people who are of a professional stature doing this exact same thing it is hard to break the trend within ourselves and that’s why racism still exist even at this point in time.