In 2015 the entertainment industry called out the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences after none of the Academy Awards’ 20 acting nominations went to people of color. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag became a rallying cry for greater inclusion and recognition of performances by and content from women and people of color.

While some may argue that this year’s crop of 2021 Oscar nominations snubbed many quality and arguably deserving and diverse film performances (Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods most notable), there’s no doubt that the Academy has made some strides with regards to inclusiveness, and presented one of its most diverse list of nominees ever.

Nearly half of the Academy’s acting nominations went to people of color this year, including three actors of Asian descent: two for best lead actor (Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed and Minari’s Steven Yeun) and one for best supporting actress (Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn). In addition, six Black actors were nominated for acting awards: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’s Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman; The United States vs. Billie Holiday’s Andra Day; One Night in Miami’s Leslie Odom Jr. and Judas and the Black Messiah’s LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya.

Davis’s best actress nomination for her performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was her fourth acting nomination, the most for any Black actress.

Behind the camera, Chloe Zhao’s best director nomination for her work on Nomadland is the first for a woman of color in the category. Overall, a reported 70 women received a whopping 76 Oscar nominations, a remarkable and precedent-setting achievement.

In a pandemic-influenced year that featured an expanded Oscar field that for the first time included cinema-targeted movies that debuted first on streaming services along with theatrically-released films, diversity and inclusion was the big winner. 

Multichannel News will explore the topic of diversity and inclusion in front and behind the camera as well as in the C-suites a part of its March 16 Culture X Conversations virtual conference,  which will feature insights from television and media leaders who are engaged in diversifying their workspace as well as content they produce so that its inclusive of those who identify by their ethnicity, nationality, language, special needs or sexual orientation. To register, click here.

As Hollywood prepares for Sunday’s Academy Awards, Fuse is shining a light on the underrepresentation of Hispanics among the major Oscar acting categories.

Fuse has teamed with the National Hispanic Media Coalition to bring more attention to the fact that none of the Oscar nominees for best actor or actress is Latino. Further, Latino actors and actresses have only garnered 16 nominations and six wins in 90 years, according to the Huffington Post.

The NHMC is planning to demonstrate the day before the Oscars to bring light to the disparity.

“We want to help them get the conversation going – they are the watchdog of Latinos in media, and they are there to elevate Latino voices on air and online, and that’s what we are here to do,” said Judi Lopez, Fuse senior vice president of distribution and affiliate marketing. “It’s important that we’re raising the issue and locking arms with them.”

Added NHMC president Alex Nogales: “We applaud Fuse for standing up for the Latino community by helping us drive awareness for this incredible inequity in representation. More media companies need to take notice and need to follow the example.”  

On Sunday, against the Oscars telecast, Fuse will air commercial-free the 2014 dramedy film Dear White People, which examines escalating racial tensions at a fictitious college. As part of that telecast, Fuse will also premiere several interstitials featuring footage from the 1950 classic film Cyrano de Bergerac, starring José Ferrer (pictured) -- the only Latino actor ever to win an Oscar for best actor. The remixed footage will use humor to call attention to the lack of Latino representation and provide thought-provoking facts on inclusion in entertainment, Fuse said.

“The interstitials are a play on what’s going on and how ludicrous the [Latino] representation – or lack thereof – is in the Oscar categories and in Hollywood,” Lopez said. 

Indeed, Latino actors and actresses represented only 3.1% of speaking roles in major Hollywood films from 2007 to 2016, Lopez said. With 56 million Hispanics in the U.S., the numbers are embarrassing.

The lack of Latino actors and actresses in prominent speaking roles may also be affecting Latino movie attendance. Lopez said Latinos represent 24% of movie ticket buyers today, down from 32% of movie ticket buyers just four years ago.

On the flip side, movies that have significant Latino representation and reflect the culture, such as Disney’s animated film Coco, can perform well at the box office. The Mexican folktale-themed film with a predominately Hispanic vocal cast has generated more than $208 million in domestic box office sales since its November 2017 release, according to Box Office Mojo.

“At 18% of the population, Latinos are still over-indexing on buying movie tickets, but you have to ask the question as to why those movie ticket buying numbers are down,” Lopez said. “Maybe its because they’re not seeing themselves represented in the movies, and representation and engagement is key. When you see yourself on television or in the movies, it resonates deeply.” 

Lopez said the network is in the planning stages of developing other initiatives that will continue to tackle the issues of inclusion and diversity beyond the Oscars both on its linear network and online. 

“This is going to have at least raised the issue during the moment in time we have here during the Oscars, and we’re going to keep on that mission,” she said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of visibility within the Latino community, and we’ll continue to look for opportunities to keep amplifying it.”

Only 28% of speaking characters across 414 films and TV episodes in 2014-2015 were from “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups, which is close to 10% below the U.S. population norm, according to a new study.

The report, from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, examined 109 films and 305 TV series and found that neither has much to brag about in terms of putting minorities and women on either side of the camera.

“This is no mere diversity problem,” said Stacy L. Smith, survey author. “. This is an inclusion crisis. Over half of the content we examined features no Asian or Asian-American characters, and over 20% featured no African-American characters. It is clear that the ecosystem of entertainment is exclusionary.”

The study comes as the Academy Awards is being blasted for its lack of minorities among nominated films, spawning the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. The Oscars telecast airs on ABC Feb. 28.

Walt Disney Co. and The CW, along with SVOD players Hulu and Amazon, got decent marks for inclusion.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.