The Academy Awards are here and all of the actors nominated for an Oscar are white.
For the second time in nearly twenty years, the 20 Academy Award nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses.
Among the actors that were snubbed in the Academy Award nominations include David Oyelowo, who was critically acclaimed for playing Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma.
In 2011, the 20 nominees were also all white. The last time before that was in 1998.
The all-white nominees comes at a critical point in American history where race relations between blacks and whites are at an all time high. Following the Sony hack, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin were forced to apologize after being racially insensitive.
Last year, actress Lupita Nyong’o took home the best supporting actress Oscar for the film 12 Years a Slave, which featured a mostly black cast and also won the best picture.
With the exception of Selma, which was nominated for Best Picture, there wasn’t a single movie nominated for an Academy Award with an ethnically diverse cast.
At the end of the day the Academy Awards is not very diverse. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts the Sciences, the group that votes for the Oscars, is nearly 94 percent white and 77 percent male. Oscars voters have a median age of 62 and people younger than 50 constitute just 14 percent of the Academy’s membership. Black voters make up just 2 percent of the academy, and Latinos make up an even smaller percentage.
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