Bias in the Academy Awards
Oscar-Winning Actors and Race
introduction.
At the 2020 Oscars, the movie Parasite won an oscar, marking history as the first international film to win both Best Picture and Best International film. The Oscars have a reputation for being biased towards white American actors. This made me wonder whether this reputation was accurate and about the demographic of Oscar award-winning actors over this history of the academy awards. to find out if this was true, I obtained a dataset called "Demographics of Academy Awards (Oscars) Winners" from Kaggle user Felix Mejia. This data set included names, date of birth, date of receiving Oscar, religion, and race of Oscar-Winning actors. The following is an analysis of the traits of Oscar-Winning actors.
data visualizations
The ages of actors winning an Oscar award has been varied and mostly consistent over time. The average age was 44.009 years old. The data had a normal distribution, slightly skewed left.
The religions, however, were less diverse. 61% of Oscar-Winning actors did not identify as a follower of a religion. In other words, 61% of the actors identified as agnostic. This is incongruent with the global average, where only 14% of people didn't identify with a religion.
The race of Oscar-Winning actors was similarly skewed. 93% of Oscar award winners were white, whereas only 11.5% of the world population is white.
74.576% of Oscar-Winning actors were from the US. Within the US, Oscar-Winning actors are concentrated in New York, California, and Chicago, this makes sense because these areas have high population density.
Home states of American Oscar-Winning Actors
conclusion.
The data shows that the most likely demographic for winning an Oscar is White American actors who do not identify with any religion. In the history of the Academy Awards, American films have always won Best Picture award. It has become expected that an American film will win. When Parasite won Best Picture, however, it broke this expectation. Some people, such as President Donald Trump, thought a domestic film would have been a better candidate. "The winner [of the Best Picture award] is a movie from South Korea — what the hell was that all about?" Trump said in a Colorado rally. The people in the committee that nominates and votes upon the Best Picture award are vastly of the same demographic. When presented with change, such as in 2018, when a new category was to be added, the reaction is overwhelmingly negative.