Nowadays, people look for reasons to get offended. Whether it’s the new Starbucks cup or the latest Donald Trump tweet, you can bet that they’re going to find something. I’m not saying that when people get offended it’s always unreasonable, I’m just saying people get offended a lot.

One of the most popular happenings of last year was the Oscar nominations. Not a single black actor or actress was nominated for an Oscar, or for any Oscars that people cared about. The biggest complaint was that Will Smith didn’t receive a nomination for his part in “Concussion,” and that none of the actors from “Straight Outta Compton” received a nomination, even though the screenwriters, who were white, did. This really got people in a tizzy, even having the phrase “Oscars so white” trending and actors like Will Smith boycotting the awards entirely. This uproar led the academy to invite a few thousand more people to vote on the awards, hoping to switch it up and make it more “modern” which in turn gave us a new set of nominations for 2017 with a much more diverse set. However, before going on to this year’s, let’s take a deeper look at last years.

As I mentioned before, there were two films that people got upset about, and those were “Concussion” and “Straight Outta Compton.” I did my research, and not many other films that starred African Americans or other such nationalities were eligible or even existed. Let’s talk about “Concussion” first. I saw “Concussion,” and honestly, I thought it was really good. Smith was fantastic in it. However, the script and some of the directing choices in it weren’t that great. Currently, it holds a 7.1 audience score on IMDB, along with a Metacritic score of only 55. What does this mean? It means that the general consensus for the film was that it wasn’t all that great. Now, regardless of the actor, how can he do something Oscar worthy with material that’s obviously subpar? “Straight Outta Compton,” on the other hand, has a Metacritic score of 72, but an audience score of 7.9, which is better but not Oscar material. Now, what am I saying here? I’m saying it’s not necessarily the Academy’s fault that we’re getting movies with diverse casts that aren’t that great. It’s ours because we keep going to see these films and we keep supporting them. One last point, I think something people forget is that actors and companies must campaign for Oscars. Like a politician running for a position, if an actor doesn’t campaign, he won’t get nominated whether he gave the performance of the year or not. So, sometimes we get mad about a certain actor not being nominated, when they didn’t even campaign in the first place.

So, let’s jump to the 2017 nominations. Actors like Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Mahershala Ali, Dev Patel and Naomi Harris, all people of color, were nominated for an Oscar. Along with films like “Moana,” “Fences,” “Hidden Figures” and “Moonlight” all being nominated for more. I didn’t see all of these films, but I did see a few, and let me tell you, they were phenomenal. Well deserving of the nominations they got, much more than the picks with diverse casts that were overlooked last year. 

I’ll end on this note, the first African American actress or actor to win an Oscar was not 20, not 50 and not even 70 years ago. But all the way back in 1939 when actress Hattie McDaniel won for her role in “Gone with the Wind.” This shows, that even all the way back when racism was commonplace, the people giving these awards were still willing to look past the color and see the talent. Just because the last two years we haven’t gotten the diverse nominations some wanted, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily because of racism. We need to support the films like “Moonlight,” “Hidden Figures” and “Fences” so that we can have the diverse casts that reflect life in great movies, as they should, instead of being satisfied with mediocre films that will get us nowhere.