The 2016 Oscars are over, and in a few months we’re going to forget who won. For the record, the surprise Best Picture winner was Spotlight. But there still seems to be a lingering debate about race and racial sensitivity in the Academy, as well as in the film industry in general. A group of 25 Asian and Asian-American Academy members (including Oscar-winner Ang Lee) wrote a letter on March 9, 2016 to the Academy, decrying the fact that after host Chris Rock brought constant attention to the #OscarSoWhite controversy, he then proceeded to make a joke about Asians and accounting, not to mention Sacha Baron Cohen’s truly tasteless, but totally unoriginal Asian male joke. I was puzzled by these incidents as much as I was surprised that some black people were themselves a little offended by other minorities wanting to piggy back on their fight against racism (look up #notyourmule for more on that). The last actor of Asian descent to be nominated for an Oscar was Rinko Kikuchi for Babel in 2006. As an Asian-American who writes about the industry, I wanted to add my voice to bring a spotlight (so to speak) on injustices in the movie industry, while admitting that the Oscars are not the problem, but the symptom.  

So, here, slightly edited and reprinted from last month’s Wong’s Turn column, are my thoughts on the matter (as a prelude to what were my predictions for the Music Oscar categories):

This year’s Oscar race has unfortunately focused more on the latter than the former—meaning “race” instead of “Oscar.” While I agree that there should be more to be done to raise the visibility of minorities in Hollywood, I think that the idea of specifically faulting the Oscars for Hollywood’s failures is to blame the symptom instead of the illness. I don’t believe that the established Oscar voters are in any way “not” voting for people because of their race. I also don’t think the newer members have an agenda to vote the PC ticket—if every young member and person of color in the Academy had nominated Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation, then he would have been nominated. But here’s a funny thing about Academy members: They do not vote in a block. They vote individually, and by their tastes. One can say that older Academy members could not relate to Straight Outta Compton in the same way that one might assert that the highly acclaimed Carol wasn’t nominated for Best Picture because of its lesbian content. Both are legitimate but also hyperbolic reasonings for the exclusions.

I want to break down how this latest controversy affects or doesn’t affect the Music Branch. Thankfully, out of the 10 music nominees, there are several people of color: In the Best Song category, Ethiopian-Canadian songwriter The Weeknd (nee Abel Makkonen Tesfaye) and his cohorts were nominated for their song “Earn It.” For Best Score, however, it’s no surprise that the five nominees are all caucasians, as are most working film composers.

Of the Oscar-bait movies this year, only three composers of color (I will include Hispanics, since in Hollywood terms, a Hispanic actor would be considered a minority) on the Oscar shortlist had even the remotest chance of getting a nomination: Terence Blanchard for Chi-Raq, Heitor Pereira for Minions, and Roque Baños for In the Heart of the Sea. Only the Spanish Baños made it onto my own list of scores that had a possibility of getting a nomination.

This leads the conversation to Ryuichi Sakamoto and his score for The Revenant, co-composed with Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner. Although the film itself was the most nominated movie of the year, the only Best Picture nominee score written by a non-white composer was deemed ineligible by the Music Branch because of the contributions of Noto and Dessner. 

Sakamoto is one of only four Asian composers to ever win an Oscar for Best Score (Cong Su, Tan Dun and A.R. Rahman being the others), and there has yet to be an Asian American nominated in the category. In fact, there hasn’t been a non-Caucasian American composer nominated for a Best Original Score Oscar since The Color Purple in 1985. Of course, I should also note that no female American composer has ever been nominated for Best Score, although Lynn Ahrens was nominated for her lyrics for Anastasia as part of its Best Musical or Comedy Score nomination.

We all know about the inequities of work in Hollywood. And while it’s good to bring it up when possible, to fault the artists who are nominated for not being non-white brings the whole institutional cache down—the same institution that the neglected so badly want to join.