Yes, black actors weren’t nominated for any Oscars this year – but that doesn’t mean you won’t see them at the ceremony.
Nearly every year, a tried-and-true mix of Hollywood royalty, like Sidney Poitier, and new, culturally relevant stars, such as Kevin Hart, are tapped to pass out awards, make jokes and perform hit songs at the Oscars show.
This year alone, 25 percent of presenters and performers are black – yet black entertainers still rarely receive the actual award.
That 25 percent is likely an effort to compensate for the imbalance in the nominations. But some viewers might have a different overall takeaway: Black people can be entertainers, but they aren’t being acknowledged as artists.
The Washington Post analyzed more than 30 years of Academy Award programs from the Oscars databases, revealing that the number of black presenters and performers onstage has been consistently higher than the number of black winners.
Overall, black entertainers have averaged 11.2 percent percent of total presenters and performers since 1969. In that same time, less than 2 percent of awards were given to black people.
Black representation onstage at the Oscars is pretty close to the percentage of speaking roles given to black people in high-grossing films, ranging from 10 and 14 percent since 2007, according to a study done by USC’s Annenberg School. Those numbers are close to the U.S. population of black people as a whole -- 13.2 percent, according to 2014 census records. It’s far more on screen representation than other ethnic groups in the United States. A cursory look at Academy records shows that other races, including Hispanic and Asian, are rarely represented as presenters or winners.
Accounting for blacks among all nominees would have been quite a task. Another Post story looked at the percentage of black nominees just in the acting categories in each decade, and the highest it got was 11.0 percent in the first decade of the 2000s, but it’s dropped to 7.0 in the 2010s, and has been lower than that in every other decade since the Oscars began.
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