When the results of the 85th annual Academy Awards trickle in this afternoon there will invariably be naysayers taking to social media to air their grievances with the ceremony: the show is too long, the fashion ridiculous, the films that won didn’t deserve to win and why wasn’t Ben Affleck nominated for Best Director?
And the most common argument of all? That the awards are often a reflection of a homogeneous, out-of-touch group of faceless people. As 2012 Best Actress nominee Viola Davis noted in the run-up to the ceremony last year, “I have to tell you, I don’t even know who is a member of the academy”.
In an attempt to shed light on exactly who is responsible for casting the votes, the Los Angeles Times conducted a study in February last year, and it seems the “out-of-touch” argument might actually be close to the truth.
Of the 5,765 voting members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science, 94% of the academy voters are white and 77% are men and have a median age of 62. People under the age of 50 account for just 14% of the membership. In other words, the votes are being cast by (relatively) old, white men in suits.
Outside of the industry’s self-congratulatory night of nights, the organisation is revealing of the lack of representation among women in the film industry. The producer branch of the Academy is made of up of just 18% of women, while the director’s branch is 9% female. Nineteen per cent of the academy’s screenwriting arm is women, and a 2011 analysis by the Writers Guild of America found that women accounted for 17% of film writers employment. Many areas of mainstream film business, including cinematography, special effects work and the executive suites, still have very few women.
While Meryl Streep remains the most Oscar-nominated actor (with 17 nominations) and another female – Katherine Hepburn – holds the most acting wins at four, only six women of colour have won acting awards. And outside of acting, the awards are even less diversified with only four women having previously been nominated for Best Director, with Kathryn Bigelow the only woman to win, for The Hurt Locker in 2010.
When it comes to winning the Best Picture award, it certainly helps if they appeal to the old white guys. As a Sony Pictures executives argued in 2012, the The Social Network may have lost the best picture race to The King’s Speech because older Oscar voters didn’t relate to “the Facebook story”.
And as Chris Knight observes for The Citizen, this year’s best picture front-runner Argo has so far had an almost unbeatably good run in the awards season because of the film’s director and star, Ben Affleck “is a handsome, charismatic movie star in his early 40s — precisely the type the more narcissistic of those older Academy members could see playing them in a movie … Showering awards on Argo is like admiring a mirror because it looks so darned handsome.”