Ask HN: Is the OSCARS Biased Against African Americans?

[auferstehung]

In October 2015, Paul Graham proposed "A Way To Detect Bias." I think that it would be not boring to determine if this method can detect bias by the OSCARS against African Americans. I am busy. This is my attempt to Tom Sawyer Hacker News into doing it for me.

[tenken]

It is not biased. While the constituency of the Oscars is ~75% white males we are talking about the _most liberal_ "white" body of individuals on the face of the Earth. This wasnt a vote in the backwaters of the South.

Actors such as Clooney, Angelina Jolie and others are world renown for their Activism. Now the media and black activists seems to be saying "well 50% of the videos aren't Black nominations".

Well, movies have to touch your heart and you have to be able to relate to them. Sorry, I don't relate directly to current black starring movies. I dont care about Medicine or Will Smith. The sum of the years black movies (for me) wasn't on topics I find interesting and which I have difficulty relating too. So why would that engender votes by Hollywood when the majority of oscar voters also aren't black and don't relate to the subject matter of the movie either -- of course other nominations (non-black) will win out.

I love star wars, and the very mainstream movies that were top box office winners this year. Someone do a study of per-month in 2015 what the top 5 grossing movies were, out of how many of were black leading roles, vs non-black roles. Show me a significant stat and that may change my opinions.

Edit: I just saw Hateful8 and it was a great movie and SLJ did an awesome job, but I assume that will be in next years Oscars maybe .... :P

[smt88]

It's impossible to detect bias in systems that are intended to be meritocracies when "merit" is subjective or related to luck. In the case of acting, merit is highly subjective.

Furthermore, trying to turn this into a "data" experiment by looking at past results is also pointless because the Academy has changed over time and every movie is different. There are too many variables.

Trying to say that the Academy is "racist" or "not racist" based on the nominations is ludicrous.

The only possible solution is to make the Academy as representative of the United States as possible and then accept whatever nominations they put forth as "probably pretty unbiased".

[joefarish]

Not according to: https://i.imgur.com/T2TqB9s.jpg

Although that excludes the data point for 2016 where there will be zero winners.