OSCAR VOTERS ARE 94% WHITE

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 21st 2012

Earlier this month The Week ran a page about the Oscars, which said the average Academy member is 57, white, male and looking out for his next job in Hollywood. Most of the voters aren't actors or directors, they are "the producers, set-builders, visual-effects specialists, sound guys and PR execs". This group is known as the "steak eaters". They're also known as the "babe vote" because that's who they like to vote for.

This article was followed by a major piece of reporting this week in the Los Angeles Times. There are 5,765 voting members in the Academy, and over the last eight months the Times reporters have confirmed the identities of more than 5,100 of them. The reporters made no attempt to evaluate political disposition, religious affiliation or economic well-being (all influential factors too) but the statistics the paper has produced were even more extreme than the ones in The Week: "Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male...Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62...People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership".

You would never know, from the widespread coverage of the Oscars, that the awards represented the combined taste of quite such a specific demographic. On Sunday, last year's best actor, Colin Firth, should announce the nominations for best actress in a leading role "as voted for by 62-year-old white males living in southern California..." There’s also a remarkable discrepancy here: the adults who go to the movies most are aged between 18 and 24, but it's people who are their parents’ age (even their grandparents’ age) who are deciding the awards. You expect members of the Academy to be over 25, but there could still be more young actors and film-makers and fewer PR execs. And perhaps members of the Academy should only get to vote for a limited number of years. Think of the alternative: if these statistics got any worse, the situation would become comical.

Age is one issue, race is another. The Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington has an answer. He told the Times: "If the country is 12% black, make the academy 12% black. If the nation is 15% Hispanic, make the academy 15% Hispanic. Why not?" The Oscars is simply too big a beast to be able to ignore this imbalance. Last year's ceremony was watched by 37m people, but the Times’s statistics suggest an unhealthy gap, which will only widen, between that vast audience and the Academy itself.