On Feb. 22, 2015, the 87th annual Academy Awards will be televised in homes across America. Little boys and girls who will grow up to win may be watching. If one of those kids happens to be not white, well … maybe they, like me, love Best Actress nominee Patricia Arquette as much as I do and want her every happiness to be fulfilled.
But the reality is that the kind of people with nominations this year are totally white for acting and mostly men for every major category. The fact that most nominations this year went to white men irked many.
How I feel about it, pretty much.
You Tuber Franziska Beck performed a parody song for the Oscars:
Its based on the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the musical “Avenue Q.”
And on Twitter, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite inspired a lot of true and hilarious commentary:
“#OscarsSoWhite they don’t see race. Or movies with black folks in it, apparently.” — rell (@Awkward_Duck) Jan. 15, 2015 “#OscarsSoWhite they prefaced each nomination with, ‘I’m not racist, but…’” — Anne T. Donahue (@annetdonahue) Jan. 15, 2015 “#OscarsSoWhite the only time a Black person is nominated, let alone wins, is if they’re in a role as a slave or the help.”— llüfke (@wjlly2) Jan. 15, 2015 “#OscarsSoWhite, it posts wistful Facebook statuses about wishing it lived in the 1950’s without realizing it’s basically there already. — Paul Krueger (@NotLikeFreddy)
Jan. 15, 2015
If one of the 20 white acting nominees motivates a kid of color to live their dreams, that’s awesome. Still, some children watching may start thinking that only a certain kind of person is successful. That’s a pretty infuriating idea to me now, but when I was a kid, I thought that was the truth, too.
