The Guardian
Andrew Pulver
As the #OscarsSoWhite protest reaches its climax in advance of Sunday’s Academy Awards, a wide-ranging academic study suggests that the problem in Hollywood goes further than one of ethnicity: exclusion extends just as severely to women and LGBT film-makers.
The Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, issued by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, concludes that statistics on non-white participation in the film and TV industries remain terrible. “We have an inclusion crisis,” said Stacy L Smith, director of the Annenberg school’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, and the study’s lead author.
The figures make equally bad reading for all groups disadvantaged in Hollywood. Women make up only 3% of all film directors, while only 2% of speaking characters in all 414 film, TV and digital shows assessed were identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Over half of all films or shows fail to include a single non-white character (despite the fact that 37% of the US population is categorised as “non-white”). Only two black female directors could be identified – Selma’s Ava DuVernay and Belle’s Amma Asante – with only seven trans characters in total.
The Annenberg report, known as CARD, analysed Hollywood feature films released in 2014 – including titles such as Birdman, Maleficent, and Ride Along – and major TV and digital shows broadcast between September 2014 and August 2015. Smith said: “It is clear that the ecosystem of entertainment is exclusionary … The results speak to the landscape of media and the erasure of different groups on screen and behind the camera.”
CARD’S headline figures showed that 33% of characters were female – but other analyses demonstrated that women made up 25% of characters over 40 years old, and that 33% of female characters were shown with “partial or full nudity” (as against 10% of male characters). In significant behind-the-camera roles, women accounted for 15% of directors and 28% of writers – dropping to a shocking 3% and 10% respectively when film is considered separately. (Along with DuVernay and Asante, the other women film directors in CARD’s figures for the year appear to be Angelina Jolie with Unbroken and Shana Feste with Endless Love.) The report also tallied up women in executive positions, with some 39% occupying senior corporate roles across the whole industry.
Figures were similarly depressing when it came to ethnic minorities, with the study’s authors suggesting “the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite should be changed to #HollywoodSoWhite, as our findings show that an epidemic of invisibility runs throughout popular storytelling”. Only 28% of characters were identified as belonging to an ethnic minority, and only 12% of films or TV shows reflecting the actual balance of ethnic minorities in US society. Ethnic minorities constituted only 12% of film directors – an area, amazingly, where film is doing better than either broadcast TV or streaming services (at 9% and 11% respectively).
The study found that LGB characters were also under-represented, with some 2% of speaking roles identified, compared to the 3.5% identified as LGB in the US population. Only seven trans characters were found in all of the films or TV shows examined – four of which came from the same digital show.
For Corrina Antrobus, director of the Bechdel Test Fest, which promotes women film-makers, the report’s conclusions are “very shocking”, even if its Hollywood orientation doesn’t necessarily reflect the breadth of activity in the film world. “It’s not the full story but it’s necessary to cause change. [The report] is not talking just about directors and performers, but also about people who are working at the networks and studios. It’s identified the bigger picture, about hiring and firing – that’s what needs to change also. It’s offered a wider insight into the overall structure of the system.”
The report also makes clear throughout that TV and digital platforms are performing better than film, with the latter scoring worse in nearly all categories. Antrobus suggests that it may be “TV’s lower stakes” that have made the difference, and that “if it’s happening in TV there’s reason it can’t be happening in film”. “There’s a much different audience for TV: more diverse, much wider, and they have to study their audience more. In film, you suspect there’s much more of a director-ego thing, and a hangover from the old studio system: the old white boys’ club helping their old white boy mates make more movies about old white men.”
Antrobus suggests that the proposed change in Oscar voting rules shows that change is possible. “Creating conversations is vital – there are so many components to it. It’s vital that people are finding their voices so much more. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago, and now we have this open forum to express dismay. If you don’t listen to your audience, you won’t thrive as a business, and I am hoping that the industry does listen.”
