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Oscars diversity

No A's for effort on H'wood's diversity report card

Maria Puente, Andrea Mandell and Brian Truitt, USA TODAY
Jesse Owens (Stephan James) and his coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) share a moment in 'Race.'

It's too late for 2015 — we already know that all the Academy Awards for acting are going to a white person. But what about next year — will Hollywood's slate of 2016 movies result in the third year in a row of #OscarsSoWhite?

With what we know so far, it doesn't look good, according to USA TODAY's diversity report card. 

There will almost certainly be last-minute changes or delays, or movies that get picked up later in the year at film festivals such as Cannes and Toronto. Who knows if a Precious or a Beasts of No Nation will suddenly appear and acquire all-important Oscar buzz? The picture can and likely will shift somewhat. 

But for now, looking at the 184 movies officially announced for release this year by 14 studios (each rolling out as many as 20 movies or as few as seven), the Academy Awards next year may be just as pale and male as this year.

Our analysis doesn't assess the Oscar viability of 2016's forthcoming movies. But it shows a discernible lack of minority and female faces in major roles and among the directors of the films being released between January and December 2016. In fact, there's a striking number of movies in which there are only white faces.

The all-female 'Ghostbusters': Abby (Melissa McCarthy, from left), Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), Erin (Kristen Wiig) and Patty (Leslie Jones).

No one makes the grade

In USA TODAY's report card for the coming year in the film industry, almost every studio deserves reprimand. But since we're grading on a curve, we've given credit to studios trying hard for a C, and four studios earned the highest grade of B.

  • Of the studios with more than 12 movies, Sony rated the highest, with a slate of 17 new movies that tallied to a final grade of B.
  • Paramount had the lowest grade, receiving an F for 14 movies.
  • Of the studios with 12 or fewer movies, Sony Pictures Classics, STX (each with nine movies) and Weinstein (12) earned a B.
  • The lowest grade among these studios went to Open Road, which received a D-  for seven movies.

"Hollywood has been whitewashed, in front of the cameras and behind, from casting to writing to producers to actors," says Jeetendr Sehdev, a professor at the University of Southern California who has researched the challenges in improving diversity in the film industry.

It may not be deliberate but thoughtless, says casting director Lana Veenker of Cast Iron Studios in Portland, Ore., who recently cast supporting roles in Reese Witherspoon's Oscar-nominated Wild and also casts for TV shows such as NBC's Grimm, CW's Significant Mother and TNT's The Librarians.

"The huge majority of roles I get asked to cast are for men, and when we have conversations with directors or producers, I always ask them, 'Couldn’t this role be played by a woman?' " she says. "And when it's brought to their attention, they often respond, 'Oh, yeah, why didn’t we think of that?' "

Don Cheadle, nominated for best actor in 2004's Hotel Rwanda, says scripts are often coded for minorities but not whites.

Nate Parker stars as slave rebel leader Nat Turner in 'The Birth of A Nation.'

"If the description for the guy says, '25-year-old student, drives a (such and such car)’ — oh, that’s the white guy. Because when it comes to your role, it’s 'black' or 'African-American,' " Cheadle told USA TODAY. Black is specified; white is the default, he says. 

The Oscar outcry

Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced last month  — and for a second year in a row included no black, brown or Asian faces — voices both inside and outside Hollywood, from President Obama to outraged movie lovers on Twitter, have been criticizing, explaining or defending the results.

Prominent black and white performers were disappointed, even "heartbroken," as Oscar winner Halle Berry put it. Some announced they would find something else to do Oscar night.

Supporting-actor nominee Sylvester Stallone (Creed) considered skipping the ceremony Feb. 28 but was talked out of it by his black director, Ryan Coogler. Neither Coogler nor Creed's black star, Michael B. Jordan, were nominated, although Stallone said they deserved to be.

"(Coogler) goes, ‘Sly, just go there, try to represent the film. We feel you deserve it. Eventually, things will change,’ ” Stallone told reporters at the annual Oscar luncheon for nominees earlier this month. "I really do owe everything to these two." 

Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in 'Creed.' Stallone is nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor, but Jordan and director Ryan Coogler were bypassed.

As the uproar mounted, the academy announced plans to expand its 6,000-plus voting membership — now dominated by older white males — in hopes of eventually producing a more inclusive slate of nominations.  

But these measures are unlikely to have much of an effect this year, because most pictures on the studios' schedules for 2016 have already been written, cast or filmed, if not completely finished. Based on how the studios have described their slates, not enough of those movies prominently feature minority or female actors, directors or stories, so next year's nominations probably will reflect that. 

In short: You can't get nominated if you're not in the picture.   

"I think (next year) will be a repeat — I can't see how it won't be," says Shawn Edwards, co-founder of the African-American Film Critics Association and a film critic for a Fox affiliate in Kansas City, Mo. 

He's excited by several forthcoming movies featuring black stories and casts, such as Miles Ahead (Sony Pictures Classics), about edgy jazz great Miles Davis, starring and directed by Cheadle, and The Birth of A Nation (Fox Searchlight), about slave rebel leader Nat Turner. Both were hailed at this year's Sundance Film Festival. 

"But I think these (films) will get overlooked," Edwards laments. "Sundance is completely diverse, and every year there are movies that get a lot of love and acclaim at Sundance and then they die after they hit the mainstream. They get lost in translation somewhere."

George Clooney in 'Hail, Caesar!' The major roles in the movie about 1950s Hollywood are very white and largely male.

Change is difficult

The problem can't be entirely explained as deliberate discrimination or white-male dominance in executive suites, according to Sehdev's startling findings at USC. His surveys show that people in the film industry and in the audiences — both black and white — say minority faces onscreen are perceived as less attractive than white faces.

"Guess what? Everybody has a white bias," Cheadle says. "Black people have a white bias. Latinos have a white bias. It’s slowly changing, but psychiatrists have done countless studies about it. We all have a white bias." 

Indeed, Hollywood still "struggles to recognize the beauty of black actors," Sehdev says. "Caucasian standards still dominate what is considered beautiful." 

Hollywood is in a lose-lose dilemma, Sehdev says. "Even if more black performers are nominated in the near future, will it be perceived as a response to worthy talent or a response to pressure? 

"Any change has to appear gradual and has to appear organic," Sehdev says. "And that kind of change takes time."

It isn't just about the money 

Nearly two decades into the 21st century, more than 100 years after the invention of movies, why is this still an issue?

There are various explanations offered, reflecting the vast machinery of moving parts that make up the film industry. Writing, producing, casting, funding, directing, distributing, promoting — all of these interlocking departments can and do play different roles in fostering or not fostering diversity. 

Are studios and film producers leery of placing, say, $50 million bets on movies about black stories and featuring black casts, assuming that white audiences won't watch? Maybe, but recent history suggests that's not always true. Besides, Hollywood's audience is global these days and most of the rest of the world is not white.

The whites-won't-watch argument clearly doesn't apply to TV and music, where diverse audiences have helped make shows like Empire a hit and scores of black musicians huge stars. 

The cast of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, from left), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Katana (Karen Fukuhara), Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman), Deadshot (Will Smith) and Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) in 'Suicide Squad.'

Paul Dergarabedian, senior box office analyst for comScore,  the global media tracker, points out that 12 Years A Slave won three Oscars in 2014 and six other nominations. It had a host of diversity firsts: It was the first film by a black director (Steve McQueen), by a black producer (McQueen) and by a black writer (John Ridley) to win best picture.

Box office and Oscar sometimes intersect, sometimes follow different paths, he says.

"Look at Room, Carol, The Big Short, Spotlight — none of those made a boatload of money," says Dergarabedian about some of the current nominees.  "Money should not be relevant to the Oscars because (the Academy voters) nominate plenty of films that nobody’s seen."

The theory is that middle-class white guys generally make movies about middle-class-white-guy stories. The thinking is the similar demographic of the academy voters will relate best to those stories — and might not even see, say, Straight Outta Compton

"It's not that members of the creative community can't create great characters who differ demographically from themselves — they can," says Martha Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State University who studies the dearth of women in TV and film.

Indeed, the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of Compton are middle-class whites. "But when we consider hundreds or even thousands of cases, as my research has, certain tendencies do emerge."

Stephan James as Jesse Owens in 'Race.'

It's better in TV

A-list TV producer Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) recently vowed to make sure his productions hired at least 50% women, people of color and LGBT people in directing jobs. But TV already has more women and minorities before and behind the cameras, says Norberto Barba, a veteran executive producer/director best known for helming NBC's Grimm and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

"I've never seen so much progress in diversity hiring," says Barba, a member of the Directors Guild of America's diversity and Latinos committees. "What's happening behind the scenes is really quite optimistic." 

As an example, he says NBC seeks out women and people of color for mentorships, opportunities to "shadow" working directors, even a boot camp, to help would-be directors get to a position where they can prove themselves.

He says these efforts are the result of the Directors Guild years ago going "face-to-face" with the networks to complain about the then-"dismal" record behind the scenes for women and people of color, and to demand action. 

"With 22 episodes, why shouldn't a certain percentage of the directors be women or people of color?" Barba says. "I’m going to reach out to folks who represent part of our audience demographic, and we'll be better for it." 

Bronson (Hugh Jackman), left, puts things in perspective for aspiring ski jumper Eddie (Taron Egerton) in 'Eddie the Eagle,' about the first British Olympic ski jumper. The film  has no discernible minorities in major roles.

Can this be fixed? 

"The number one issue is jobs," says Edwards, echoing a common argument. "You don't want quotas but you want more (women and minorities) who are working as writers, editors, costume designers and at the executive level. Create more opportunities for that and that in turn creates more opportunities for more movies about different types of (life) experiences."

If enough A-level directors and producers and writers demand, "I need more blacks and Hispanics and Asians in my crew, in my cast," then it's more likely to happen, Edwards says.

One way to improve diversity is to widen the pipelines that bring new talent into the film business, an already notoriously difficult industry to break into.

To be a screenwriter, writers need to develop skills that come with experience and time, and then they need the industry connections to get hired, says Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, the eastern division of the union that represents screenwriters.

"That’s where the pipeline comes in — how do we make it more possible for more diverse writers to build a career? One thing we're trying to do is overcome these historical networks," he says. "It's not even necessarily a consciously discriminatory process, it's just that people hire people they know."

Peterson says his union is preparing a campaign in the New York legislature seeking a new state tax credit for film and TV productions that hire more women and minorities, thus "incentivizing" diversity in hiring on film projects.

Lana Condor is Jubilation Lee/Jubilee  in 'X-Men: Apocalypse.'

Another pipeline project was founded by Franklin Leonard, a black film-development executive who started The Black List online in 2012 to help connect would-be screenwriters of all races to industry pros. So far, according to the website, more than 225 films have been made from Black List scripts, including Oscar winners such as Argo and The King's Speech

Casting pro Veenker last year started a talent diversity initiative featuring a free workshop to train actors of color in Portland to help broaden the pool of local talent. Thirty-two actors were admitted and some are already getting bookings (and moving to Los Angeles), she says. Now studios and state and local governments are considering ways to help fund it so she can hire more coaches and train more actors.   

She believes there is an authentic desire across the board in the industry to do something about diversity. But it's complicated by fears that doing so might also increase minority faces in the "usual" roles, say as slaves or drug dealers.

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in 'Miles Ahead.'

"Nobody wants to be seen as stereotyping," Veenker says. So the dilemma for casting, directors and producers is they may have to "discriminate against blacks in order not to appear to be discriminating against blacks."

Give the last word to filmmaker Steven Spielberg, leading Hollywood titan, Oscar winner and father to two black children. He recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he was "surprised" that Compton wasn't nominated for best picture, nor British actor Idris Elba for his powerful performance in Beasts of No Nation. But he said everybody in the film industry, top to bottom, is responsible for reversing the diversity dilemma. 

"We have to stop pointing fingers and blaming the academy," he said. "It's people that hire, it's people at the main gate of studios and independents. It's the stories that are being told. It's who's writing diversity — it starts on the page. And we all have to be more proactive in getting out there and just seeking talent."

Contributing: Jennifer Tonti and Bryan Alexander

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