History of Racial Diversity in Academy Award Winners and Nominees
In 2016, the campaign #OscarsSoWhite was created to call out the lack of diversity in nominations for the
Academy Awards, Oscars. At that time when the the digital activism went viral, the Academy revealed that
of its 6000 members, 93 percent were white and 76 percent were men, while the median age was 63.
The purpose of our information visualizations is to show the racial diversity (or lack thereof) of Academy
Award nominees and winners, especially focusing on underrepresented minorities and foreign nominees over time.
Hattie McDaniel is the first Black actor who have been nominated and win an Oscar. She, along with the other film's Black actors, wwas not allowed from attending the film's premiere in 1939. Although a huge accomplishment for the Black community, she still faced criticism for playing roles that perpetuated negative stereotypes of her race such as playing servants and slaves.
Jose Ferrer is the first Puerto Rican-born actor and the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Prior to this, he won a Tony Award in 1947 for Best Actor in a Play.
Miyoshi Umeki was a Japanese-American singer and actress. She is the first East Asian-American woman to win an Academy Award for acting. In addition, she was nominated for the Golden Globe Awards (1962, 1970) and Tony Awards (1959).
Hover on the dots to see a person's name and when they won. Click on a dot to learn more information about the timeline of Academy Award winners won by a person of color.
Apart from the lack of racial diversity we have seen from the Academy Awards, there are not many international films that won Best Picture, one of the big five awards presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences. The geographic map below shows the number of films nominated or won the Academy Award from each country. Different colors indicate the range of numbers, and there is an option to select between nominated films or Oscar-winning films using a dropdown button. The number will also be shown when hovering at a country on the map.
The visualizations show that the Academy Awards are not much inclusive until the recent years, after the campaign #OscarsSoWhite. However, people still look forward to seeing new changes from the Academy and the movie industry. On September 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars, which could be another stage of improving diversity and inclusion for the Orcars nominees in the future.
We used the Oscar Award,
1927-2020 dataset, Demographics of Academy Awards (Oscars) Winners, and the Movies Dataset to get background of the nominees. The datasets are combined and
cleaned to focus on racial diversity for data analysis.
The Oscar Award dataset (7 columns and 10396 rows) contains all of the nominations on the Academy Awards, Oscar from 1927 to 2020. The items
include released years (int), the year of ceremony (int), the number of ceremony (int), nomination categories (string),
nominees (string), film titles (string), and whether they win or not (boolean).
The Movies dataset (43 columns and 45467 rows) contains metadata on over 45,000 movies, such as cast and crew information (array), revenue (int),
ratings (int), and spoken languages (string).