How White are the Oscars?

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about how non-diverse the Oscars typically are. That seems to be right, but I’ve never really seen some numbers on it. Let’s take a look …

Note

There are a lot of Oscars (sound editing, anyone?). So, I made an executive decision to limit it to the big 3 – director, best actor, best actress. Yeah, yeah, I probably shoulda include best supporting, but I like how these 3 are all actually pretty equal … plus I’m really lazy.


Number

Well, the first thing we need to look at is just the raw numbers:

So, a couple of things:

• For the 1st 20 years, there were no non-white awardees
• After the 1st, it took another 12 years to get the next, then another 20 to get the 3rd, then another 20 to get the 4th (interestingly, all 4 were for actors)
• Only in this century did things start to pick up
• There were still 7 years, though, where everybody was White
• There has only been one non-white actress

Percentage

Now, as you can imagine, there have been a ton of these awards given out in the past non-quite 90 years. So, how does all this look percentage-wise?

A couple of observations:

• Up until the current century, this line was basically flat – at below 2%!
• Things have improved since then, but we’re still at only 5%.  
• On the other hand, that line actually does have a real slope now.

Verdict

Pretty darn white, but let's give 'em a point for at least tryin'.