The Academy Awards have been under fire for under-representation in their top categories. Four years after #OscarsSoWhite first began trending, I dug into the data for every Oscar nominee and winner in the history of the award show. Each timeline below plots every nominee from that category's history by year. Dots above the line are non-white nominees (or, for the director gender chart, women); dots below the line are white nominees (or men). A gold dot means that nominee won the award. Hover any dot for the nominee's name, role, and film.
The first non-white nominee was actually a winner: Jose Ferrer took home the Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac in 1950. But there are large stretches, like the 1970s, where there are hardly any non-white nominees at all, and only four separate years have more than one non-white nominee at a time.
I must note that although this chart treats white/non-white as a binary, it is, of course, more complicated than that. Jose Ferrer and Ben Kingsley are relatively white-passing, while fellow Best Actor winners such as Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington are not — another factor to keep in mind when considering how historically inclusive (or not) the Academy has been.
Racial discrimination is even more apparent in the Best Actress category. Only 17 non-white actresses have ever been nominated for this award, and only one has ever won — Halle Berry, for Monster's Ball. It's now been almost a decade since our last non-white nominee for Best Actress.
I'll note that although the term "actress" has fallen out of favor, I'm still using it here as a way to distinguish between gendered Oscar categories.
In this category there are sometimes stretches where the nominations and awards seem almost proportionate, followed and preceded by stretches of almost zero recognition of actors of color. The entire 1960s and 1970s were nearly swept by white actors, while the 1980s to mid-2000s neared representation. But instead of continuing that trajectory, Barkhad Abdi in Captain Phillips is the only non-white supporting actor to be nominated since 2006.
This category sees a similar feast-or-famine phenomenon. From 1962 to 1989 there were only eight non-white nominees and no winners. But Supporting Actress also contains the best stretch for representation of any category: from 2006 to 2013 it had nine non-white nominations and four winners.
Acting isn't the only award that goes to a single person — Best Director has been given out since the beginning of the show. Until the mid-2000s, this category looked the most bleak of any of them, with only seven non-white nominees and no winners in nearly 80 years. But after Ang Lee became the first non-white director to win, in 2005, six of the following seven Best Director awards went to non-white directors.
Unlike the acting awards, Best Director isn't gendered — and broken down by gender, the results are striking. There have only been five total nominations for women since 1927, with a single win: Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker in 2009.
It's not entirely clear how much of the blame for these biased nominations should fall on the Academy itself — of the top films of 2018, only 8% were directed by women, and nearly three-quarters of all characters in the top movies of 2014 were white. But the Academy isn't a neutral bystander either: a 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation found its voting members were 94% Caucasian, 77% men, and 86% older than 50. Four years after #OscarsSoWhite first trended, there have been exactly zero non-white Best Actress, Supporting Actress, or Supporting Actor nominees.
Assumptions about the ethnicity of an actor were made using the National Names Database. This is not a perfect method — corrections are welcome via the GitHub repository linked above.
Inspiration for this analysis was taken from a Time Magazine story posted in 2016.
[1] "Study: Women Film Directors Saw Their Numbers Shrink in 2018," Gregg Kilday, The Hollywood Reporter.
[2] "Out Of 30,000 Hollywood Film Characters, Here's How Many Weren't White," Laura Santhanam & Megan Crigger, PBS NewsHour.
[3] "Unmasking Oscar: Academy Voters Are Overwhelmingly White and Male," Los Angeles Times, 2012.