Dear All,

After the announcement of the nominees for this year’s Oscars, an interesting debate is now raging about the racial bias of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Director Spike Lee announced a boycott of the awards because he could not support the "Lilly white [sic] Academy Awards" and questioned "How is it possible for the 2nd consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are white?" Actor Will Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith said she would boycott the event -- neither attend nor watch it -- because "begging for acknowledgement or even asking [to be nominated] diminishes dignity."

Lee’s new film Chi-Raq is an adaptation of a western classic, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and is set in modern day Chicago against a backdrop of gang violence. Despite being critically acclaimed, the film failed to be noticed by the Academy. Pinkett-Smith’s husband actor Will Smith missed out on a nomination for his film Concussion, again despite stellar reviews. But their boycott decision is not a case of sour grapes; it is a timely reminder of a very real bias within the US Film Academy, a bias that consistently overlooks outstanding performances and productions because of colour blindness and which also fails to provide strong roles for non-White actors.

Michael Moore has announced that he too will be joining the boycott. It was, you may remember, a Michael Moore film that made the wicked point about the (token) black actor usually being the one to be killed off in any movie. That was in Canadian Bacon, way back in 1995, when the characters sit around the campfire talking about movies and Bill Nunn character points out that in Hollywood movies: "The black guy always dies first".

It is astonishing how many ensemble Hollywood movies this actually holds true for. And often the black character will be defined largely in terms of the main, white, character.

A very interesting piece by Nadia and Leila Latif in last week’s G2 (The Guardian) talked about racial stereotypes in films and went though various tests and measures that have been created to assess the strength of a non-white characters role in any film. In this regard they mention Dylan Marron’s Every Single Word Tumblr, "where he has edited together all the lines spoken by characters of colour in dozens of films from the past 50 years".

This comprises in the Harry Potter films, just 6 minutes, in Birdman 50 seconds, in Black Swan 20 seconds, American Hustle 40 seconds… etc etc.

Various methods have, over the years, been developed to measure the strength of screen roles. The Latif piece mentions the Bechdel Test which is used to asses whether women are adequately represented, which apparently is a simple measure: two women must talk to each other about something other than a man. Since then there have been attempts at a ‘racial Bechdel Test, most notably the Nikesh Shukla one in which "two main characters talk to each other without mentioning their race". In most instances you find that everything is about the white protagonist, that the other characters are almost props to support them and their story.

It’s been almost a century since Al Jolson and the Minstrels blackened their faces and performed as ‘black’ performers with embarrassingly stereotypical mannerisms. Yet even now the stereotyping continues. As Viola Davis pointed out in her speech at last year’s Emmy Awards it is not ability but opportunity that is lacking for black actors.

Well let’s see how it all works out on the Oscars night…

Best wishes