
Ask HN: Is the OSCARS Biased Against African Americans? - auferstehung
In October 2015, Paul Graham proposed &quot;A Way To Detect Bias.&quot; 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.
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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

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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".

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joefarish
Not according to:
[https://i.imgur.com/T2TqB9s.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/T2TqB9s.jpg)

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

