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Oscars Exhibited in Beverly Hills

Source: David McNew / Getty

The Hollywood Reporter ruffled some feathers among both the industry and the public when they blamed their all-White award season cover on entertainment industry standards.

The magazine released their “Actress Roundtable” cover issue featuring eight prominent actresses — Cate Blanchett, Jane Fonda, Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Charlotte Rampling, and Kate Winslet — with no women of color present. THR also paired the cover with an essay penned by Stephen Galloway, the magazine’s executive editor of features.

In the essay, he said this year’s films up for Oscars and other prestigious awards didn’t feature women of color, hence the cover featuring only popular White actresses. This ‘pipeline’ approach led Galloway to tell The Huffington Post it isn’t up to THR or the Academy–it’s the industry that has the problem.

The Huffington Post reports:

“That was appalling,” Galloway said, before laying out “the awful truth. [T]here are no minority actresses in genuine contention for an Oscar this year. The problem is not just who is being cast, it’s what movies are being made,” Galloway told HuffPost. “If I knew the column would have gotten this response, I would have added the statistics: I would have gone to each studio and said ‘How many people of color are in your executive suites? How many people are on your development team?’”

In 2015, there have been a number of films featuring women of color, such as Salma Hayek and Quvenzhane Wallis’s The Prophet, Tessa Thompson in Creed, and Lupita Nyong’o in the upcoming Star Wars film. Janice Min, Chief Creative Officer for THR, tweeted a few of the mag’s 2015 covers that featured Emmy winner Viola Davis and other women of color, but fans weren’t appeased.

One of the hardest pills to swallow was Galloway’s admission they left Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray out of the director’s roundtable cover.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

On our most recent Director Roundtable, forced to choose among three superb filmmakers for one slot, I opted for Ridley Scott rather than Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray, an African-American. The Martian had opened to exceptional acclaim and box office, and Scott looked like the front-runner for the Oscar. Still, I now wish I had added Gray to the mix, and regret that I ignored both his lawyer’s and his agents’ pleas to do so. At least I can take comfort in having three men of color on our upcoming Actor Roundtable.

If there were far more minority men and women to choose from, this sort of hand-wringing wouldn’t exist. And it’s about time it changed.

The problem is about more than just the absence of Indian, Asian, Black, and Latino actresses in this magazine. The entertainment industry has been hit with a high demand for more people of color in director chairs and equal pay for male and female actresses.

But the ‘Actress Roundtable’ cover proves we still have a long way to go.

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Twitter Responds To The Hollywood Reporter’s All-White ‘Actress Roundtable’ Cover  was originally published on newsone.com

For 2024’s iteration of MadameNoire and HelloBeautiful’s annual series Women to Know, we knew we wanted to celebrate the people who help make the joys of film and television possible. To create art is to create magic. This year, we spotlight Hollywood Executive’s changing the face of cinema.