Winning a little golden trophy is cute and bless his heart, DiCaprio deserves one considering how much he cares.
But here’s the truth: no one wins this year. Why? Because this is the year the Oscars go under. Next year there’ll be guaranteed “diversity” (deliberate, artificial obligatory nominations based on race and potentially gender), thus taking away the actual authenticity and prestige of the award across the board. The minute you make a designated, obligatory spot for a demographic you instantly rob your award of its meaning, of its value. This is not opinion, this is fact. If a solely merit-based award all of a sudden gets hacked down to a “check your skin pigment” award, it’s now based on something other than merit and is thus less valuable as an outstanding achievement award.
Do I have my gripes with this year’s nominations? You bet. But we all do. Whining and making them pull strings behind the curtains to instill unspoken quotas is NOT the way to go about it.
But what do I know, I’m just #whitesplaining.
That’s code for logicsplaining in 2016, I guess.
Robert's Interstellar Soapbox 
Reblogged this on Bobbi's Blog.
Here’s the thing. I haven’t seen all the movies that came out this (or last) year, but I think I get what you’re saying and agree with you. There are probably a lot of black actors and actresses that should be up for nomination and aren’t. However, I find it hard to believe that they are not BECAUSE they are black. This isn’t because I’m so naïve as to think that there is no such thing as prejudice, but rather because in the past there have been winners who have been African American or a race other than white.
I agree that there shouldn’t be a guarantee for there to be diversity. Someone shouldn’t be nominated only because of their race, that’s not fair. They should be nominated because of their performance and skill as an actor/actress. Isn’t that the whole point of the award? I totally agree with you.
Here’s the truth of the matter: less black people are in Oscar-tier movies that reach the public eye. We can argue Straight Outta Compton for weeks, sure, but by and large the casting of The Revenant is not chock full of them. Neither is Mad Max. Neither is Room. Stellar movies where it makes no historical, geographical or directorial sense to cast a black person as the lead. So are we now going to yell at every director for casting with his gut rather than an obligatory quota system?
The only black best actor nominee in the past decade was for 12 Years a Slave, and as good as that movie was it’s not hard to see that particular nomination for Ejiofor (important note: NOT a win, either) was given out of white guilt from the Academy (slavery/oppression-based movies have this effect. The Birth of a Nation [2016] will repeat the cycle all over, mark my words).
As such, there’s an interesting paradox here that the idiotic #Oscarssowhite Twitter warriors want to occur: we should be awarding more black actors and actresses for things they haven’t been in. The problem DEFINITELY isn’t the Academy, they’re just voting on what they’ve got. It’s the industry as a whole where we need to be looking to see if things will change. But how can they change? Do we need to shove diversity down everyone’s throat so there’s an obligatory race/gender card being satiated while we rob directors of their artistic vision? It’s a no-win situation, frankly, and one party is going to be royally peeved no matter what.