7. The Voters Are All Old, White Men
When the LA Times conducted a study into the make-up of AMPAS, the people who vote on the Oscars, they had some troubling findings to report; the Academy is primarily filled with white, old men. Oscar voters are 94% white and 77% male, and have a median age of 62, with only 14% of the Academy being less than 50 years old. One has to immediately ask - how is this representative of society at large? The answer, of course, is that it isn't, and it goes a way to explain why pandering, patronising trash like The Blind Side and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received Best Picture nominations, as it appeals to their relatively outmoded sensibilities. It also explains why more uncomfortable films like Shame didn't even garner a Best Actor nomination, because 62-year-old men are generally not that comfortable talking about or watching this sort of thing (more so than the rest of us, anyway). If the Oscars wants to be more current and relevant, then it needs to create a more diverse pool of talent; this isn't to say that the Academy should only nominate token ethnics and token females, but that something desperately has to change or it simply becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.