For the second year in a row, no movies featuring predominantly non-white casts were nominated for Best Picture. The lack of diversity extends into the other categories as well. Latino/Hispanic nominees total just 19 since the Academy Awards ceremony was created in 1929, while Asian nominees come to the paltry total of nine.

Since its inception in 1929, the Academy has awarded Oscars and nominations to various people for their achievements in film. Yet out of those 88 years, only 66 black people have been nominated for acting awards with only 14 taking home the Oscar. A Los Angeles Times article from 2012, revealed that Oscar voters were 94 percent white and 77 percent male, with only 2 percent black and less than 2 percent Hispanic.

While in 2015, Selma, a film about the civil-rights movement, was nominated for best picture and best song, but it did not win any Oscar, this year, critically acclaimed movies like "Creed," "Straight Outta Compton," Beasts of No Nation," and "Concussion," which all feature African-American actors, were also left out from the string of films selected by the Academy. Last week, Idris Elba, the main actor in Beasts of No Nation, a drama about child soldiers in West Africa, addressed British Parliament about the need for diversity on screen. “Diversity in the modern world is more than just skin colour, it’s gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, social background, and, most important of all, as far as I’m concerned, diversity of thought”, Elba said in his remarks.

Some actors in Hollywood have had enough and suggest to boycott the ceremony. Jada Pinkett Smith, speaking in place of her husband, actor Will Smith, who was not nominated for his portrayal of "a really sensitive bright African immigrant" in Concussion, shared a video via Facebook, insisting that it is time for people of color to be recognized for their artistic accomplishments. Mr and Mrs Smith also announced they would be not attending the 2016 Academy Award.

For the activist and civil rights icon Reverend Al Sharpton, the movie industry is like the Rocky Mountains, “the higher you get, the whiter it gets.” Last November when accepting an honorary Oscar at the 7th annual Governors Awards, Spike Lee, whose “Do The Right Thing” is considered one of the greatest movies not to have won an Oscar, said that it is easier for an African-American, to be President of the United States than to be the head president of a Hollywood studio or TV network cable”. In an interview with Variety, George Clooney, a white Hollywood celebrity, said, “Hollywood's problems with diversity should have been dealt with long ago. By the way, we're talking about African Americans. For Hispanics, it's even worse”.

And for a second year straight, the color debate also erupted on social media. Just over a week after the publication of this list of candidates all-white, a special hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has been revived to blame Hollywood for believing that it's better for business to have a white lead than a person of color in their next movie.

On its side, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems well aware of the problem, having implemented a new initiative called A2020, to encourage more diversity in Hollywood.

But, lack of diversity, is not only an Oscar issue. “It affects society as a whole”, said Phillip Atiba Goff, an associate professor of social psychology at UCLA specializing in race issues. Audiences around the globe are being shown a world of fiction where the absence of diversity can lead to stereotypical associations about people of different races, age, gender, national origin and point of view. A 2014 UCLA study, The Hollywood Diversity Report, (1), the most comprehensive look to date at diversity in the entertainment industry, shows that women, people of color and queer characters are vastly underrepresented in Hollywood.

Yet, diversity is not an just an all American issue. In Europe, it is still difficult for actors with foreign backgrounds to escape the cliché. Most of them continue to be typecast into certain kinds of roles. For example, Turkish or Iranian actors are often requested to play a grocer, an Islamist or a terrorist. The result? Society is infinitely more diverse than the film industry is.

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