At one time, the Oscars were April Reign’s Super Bowl. She watched the annual nominations and awards ceremony religiously for decades. So, in January 2015, she tuned in as usual to see Chris Pine and Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first Black female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, announce that year’s nominees. And after noticing that not one of the 20 acting nominations included a person of color, she took to Twitter to give the Academy Awards a piece of her mind: “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair.”
The following year, when all of the acting nominations went to white actors again, Reign’s hashtag took off, becoming a social justice phenomenon. People all over the world adopted and workshopped the hashtag to express their own disappointment with racial inequity in the entertainment industry. It inspired other hashtags, too, like #WhiteWashedOUT for Asian actors.
“#OscarsSoWhite is so obvious,” Reign says today. “I didn’t break any mold. It was just me saying things out loud in a different way that people have been saying for years.”
In the wake of the public backlash, the Academy took action. The organization — which is made up of more than 9,600 voting members from across the entertainment industry, and broken into branches by craft, such as casting directors and visual effects artists — has since doubled the number of women and tripled voters of color in its membership. In 2020, it announced new diversity standards for Best Picture eligibility. In 2021, Nomadland’s Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to win Best Director. In 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, featuring a primarily Asian cast and an Asian American co-director in Daniel Kwan, swept seven categories at the ceremony. A decade on from the grassroots movement, it seems like good progress has been made.
But many advocates — including Reign, a former attorney who now spearheads diversity initiatives as a media strategist — say these changes don’t go deep or far enough, and that the Academy continues to underserve performers and filmmakers of color. There is research to back up that notion. For example, according to a report from the University of South Carolina’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released last year, from 1929 through 2024, just six percent of all Oscar nominations went to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.
Reign says, given the long history of racism in Hollywood, the industry shouldn’t be patting itself on the back for an isolated breakthrough award for a filmmaker or star of color. “The Academy is bumping up against 100 years, and that’s just when they started celebrating themselves,” she says. “There’s more than 100 years of film, and so we shouldn’t still be talking about the first or the second [person to win].”
THE CHANGES THAT HAVE taken place did not come easily. There were controversies and public relations blunders along the way, as Hollywood grappled with its image and sweeping shifts in the larger culture. In 2016, Oscars host Chris Rock opened the show acknowledging the racial reckoning, noting that Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Will Smith had all opted to boycott the “White People’s Choice Awards.” But he ended his monologue with a sincere plea, asking for equal opportunities for Black actors.
Still, having Rock emcee the ceremony was not the diversity cure-all AMPAS may have thought it was. That evening’s ceremony featured two comedic bits that perpetuated stereotypes about Asians. In one, the obligatory part of the ceremony where the accountants who tabulate votes are introduced, Rock brought out three Asian children dressed in suits. The move (along with a joke by Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Ali G, that played on a racial slur) prompted prominent Asian members of the Academy, including Oscar winner Ang Lee, to publish an open letter in protest.
“They made this thing about Chris being the host, and they’re trying to diversify the program, and then to have that in the same year was so incongruous,” says Michelle Sugihara, who leads the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment. “But, [it] also underscored that diversity for so long was just a Black and white issue.”
Michelle Yeoh celebrating her Best Actress win for her performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once at the 2023 Oscars ceremony.
Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Unrest also seeped into the Academy’s executive staff. In 2017, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, whose term as president was coming to a close, stepped down from the organization’s board altogether. Although she didn’t specify why, her departure followed ongoing strife around and the notorious incident where La La Land was mistakenly named Best Picture over Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. At least four Black executives at the Academy have since packed their bags as well. Jeanell English, a former executive vice president of impact and inclusion, left in 2023, after what she called a “steady flux of micro- and macro-aggressions,” and inflexible leaders who “feared change, feared losing relevance, feared losing money.”
The exodus of Black executives prompted Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Janet Yang to issue a letter to members in 2023. According to Variety, the letter highlighted that 42 percent of Academy executives at or above the vice-president level were people of color and informed members of their expanded employee resources, improved diversity-based recruiting and hiring, and expanded talent development programs.
SCRATCHING AT THE SURFACE of the positive changes the industry has seen reveals the work left to be done. On the plus side, the Academy has continued to diversify its ranks. As of 2025, 36 percent of active members are women, up from 26 percent in 2015, and 23 percent are from underrepresented ethnic and racial backgrounds, up from 10 percent in that same time frame, according to self-reported responses by members. But, as Reign points out, the figures still translate to an “overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male” voting body.
Examining the new inclusion standards for Best Picture eligibility exposes flaws, too. The rules, which went into full effect in 2024, require nominated films to meet diversity standards in two of four categories: casting, crew leadership, training programs, and marketing teams. To satisfy the casting requirement, for example, films had to meet one of these standards: feature a lead or significant supporting actor who is a person of color; center its story around LGBTQ+ people, women, or an underrepresented racial or ethnic group; or feature 30 percent of the cast from two of the aforementioned marginalized groups. Dissenters were quick to call the standards subpar, arguing it would be more challenging not to meet them.
“When they first announced it, I was critical of the initiative because films like Gone With the Wind would still apply,” Reign says. “We know Gone With the Wind did not paint us in the best of light, right? If there are loopholes within your initiative that one can drive a truck through, then it may just be window dressing and performative.”
Best Picture nominees like 2016’s La La Land, 2019’s Joker, and 2024’s Holdovers all feature largely white casts, but because they include an actor of color in a supporting role, they met the benchmark. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer also features a predominantly white cast but cruised by the Best Picture standards because nearly a dozen women held senior crew positions, and at least one senior makeup role went to Luisa Abel, who is of Hispanic descent.
Stacy Smith, the founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which uses research and advocacy to encourage equitable changes in Hollywood, says that the guidelines are simply too easy to meet. “If 90 out of 100 films already pass, that’s not a standard,” says Smith. “That’s like the student taking a class and just passing without really doing anything.”
Smith, who has analyzed 96 years of data on race and gender representation at the Oscars, finds it most frustrating that the Academy has not called on external experts and diversity researchers to help fix issues of inequity. Like Reign, she points to the relatively weak gains that have been made in recent years. In 2024, for example, while much was made of indigenous actor Lily Gladstone’s Best Actress nomination, the vast majority of Oscar nominees, 80 percent, were white. And in categories such as film editing, visual effects, costume design, and sound, the last decade has seen meager increases in nominees of color.
“What’s at stake here is erasing talent because of how they look or how they identify,” Smith says. “It seems to be antithetical to what Hollywood stands for, and so it’s incredibly important to ensure that all talent can rise, and right now that’s not the case.”
The Hollywood Diversity Report, an annual analysis of the entertainment industry conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, revealed in 2024 that people of color were underrepresented across all theatrical film sectors: writers, directors, actors, and leads. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, director of UCLA’s Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, who co-authored the report, says the data speaks to an “elite club” of workers who are spoon-fed the same opportunities.
“You’ll find that through the years there are certain sets of directors of color that are the ones getting these opportunities over and over again,” Ramón says. “They deserve it but, it’s so hard to get into that special club, to get that opportunity. And it’s very exclusive. So, we see a lot of progress, but, at the same time, it’s not enough.”
Brenda Castillo, who leads the National Hispanic Media Coalition, has also pushed for reform at the Oscars. When #OscarsSoWhite became a battle cry for diversity in Hollywood, she called Reign to ask for permission to use the phrase in press releases and public statements. Castillo says she applies its underlying ethos in her advocacy and policy work.
“The legacy of #OscarsSoWhite should be measured not just in hashtags, but in the long, lasting transformations that impact the fabric of Hollywood for generations to come,” Castillo says.
As Reign reflects on the decade-old movement, she notes that the Oscars are not really the place where change is enacted. The Academy can only bestow awards on the pool of films that are made each year. So the important work begins with instilling systemic change across all segments of the entertainment industry, from below-the-line workers to the faces we see onscreen.
“I have always thought that the real change needs to start on the page and in the writers room,” Reign says. “The most important question that we should ask, with respect to these issues of equity and representation, are who is telling the story and whose story is being told.”
