Elections

Hillary Clinton Says Oscars Need More Diversity

Chuck Ross Investigative Reporter
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Hillary Clinton — who is running for president in the whitest Democratic party contest in years — says that the 2016 Academy Awards are too white and that the motion pictures association that picks nominees has to “catch up with our reality” on racial diversity.

“I think it is overdue, but the Academy announced that they are going to be making some changes as they should,” Clinton told AOL when asked about a push to diversify Oscars nominees.

The nomination of only white actors and actresses for the main acting categories led to intense criticism from fans and actors alike. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite went viral on social media, and several black celebrities, including director Spike Lee and actor Will Smith, said they will boycott the awards show, which is scheduled for Feb. 28.

The backlash prompted Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to call for “big changes” to how nominees are selected.

“As many of you know, we have implemented changes to diversify our membership in the last four years. But the change is not coming as fast as we would like,” Isaacs said last week.

And Clinton appears to agree.

“Just think of the great films that not only display the diversity of America, but the diversity of the human experience,” she told AOL.

“The Academy has to catch up with our reality.”

Clinton’s critique of a racially skewed nomination process is somewhat ironic given that the Democratic field is the whitest it has been since 1992.

The monochromatic field, which pales in comparison to the diversity of the GOP bench, led Van Jones, a CNN political commentator and former White House official, to criticize his own party back in October.

“I think this whole party has a problem. This is the whitest field that we have seen since 1992. There’s no Sharpton. There’s no Carol Moseley Braun. There’s no non-white people there, and this is a party that has to get, not 60 percent, not 70 percent, not 90 percent, but 94 percent of the black vote to win,” Jones said. (RELATED: Democratic Party Has ‘A Problem’)

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