Helen Mirren has defended the Oscars against “unfair accusations that the world’s most famous film ceremony is a racist institution.
Speaking to Channel 4 News, Mirren says that the Oscars failure to nominate a single actor of color has nothing to do with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“I think it’s unfair to attack the Academy,” she told presenter Jon Snow. “It just so happened this year it went that way.”
Idris Elba was widely expected to receive a nomination in the best supporting actor category for his performance in Netflix child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation. Elba was awarded by the Screen Actors Guild at the weekend and has also received a Golden Globe nomination, but Mirren, who won the best actress Oscar in 2007 for her turn as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’s The Queen, said too few Academy members had seen Cary Fukunaga’s movie.
“He [Idris] wasn’t nominated because not enough people saw, or wanted to see, a film about child soldiers in Somalia or the Congo or somewhere like that,” said the 70-year-old, who was promoting her role as Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in new film Trumbo. “They just couldn’t face watching that movie and so not enough people saw that movie. It wasn’t in the cinema for long enough.”
Mirren added: “The thing is all of these things count, people don’t really realise how much these things matter. And because of all of that he wasn’t nominated – which he absolutely should have been. And if he’d been nominated we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but we should be having this discussion.
“The conversation is incredibly important,” she continued. “It forced the conversation.”
Mirren said the issue was not which actors were being rewarded with Oscars recognition, but how to improve diversity in Hollywood so that more people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds were given opportunities within the film industry.
“I’m saying that the issue we need to be looking at is what happens before the film gets to the Oscars,” she said. “What kind of films are made, and the way in which they’re cast, and the scripts … So it’s those things that are much more influential ultimately than who stands there with an Oscar.”
