By the night of April 25, the 93rd annual Academy Awards also known as “Oscars” was held in Los Angeles, gathering Hollywood movie stars, actors and directors from America and other countries. During the ceremony, diversity and inclusion in the film industry have been highlighted since foreign movies have appeared to be awarded more prerogatives regarding the nominations.

Diversity in the film industry has so long been the main concerns of many movie players and producers and has always created controversy among moviegoers; but that night in Los Angeles, the 93rd Oscars annually presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seemed to have astonished its audience worldwide since the unforgettable Oscar nominations of 2015 and 2016 leading to the inception of “Oscars so white” hashtag. This year, the Academy Awards have learnt a lot from these previous events. They have made diversity efforts through underlying representation and inclusion in the nominations.

Among nominees was “NOMADLAND”, the 2020 American movie drama, based on the book of Jessica Bruder, entitled “Nomadland: Surviving America in The Twenty-First Century”. This is a movie produced and directed by Chloé Zhao, a Chinese-born woman filmmaker. She relates the story of the protagonist Fern who decided to leave her hometown after her husband passed away. Later, she lost her job to live a nomad lifestyle while becoming houseless dwelling in a van and travelling throughout the United States. The movie has got six awards including Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Best Achievement in Directing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Achievement in Film Editing and Best Achievement in Cinematography. In fact, the overall awards Nomadland movie has won so far are 230, along with 132 nominations between the intervals of a few months only since 2020. Earlier this year, Nomadland also won two Golden Globes, out of four nominations, the 2021 British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) for Best Film.

Back to the story of the Academy and its Oscars

Since few people have been able to create motion pictures and technological contents, making a film had been the logical follow-up of such a great ingenuity; hence the creation of a cinematography industry which then gave birth to the Academy in 1927 – which is today’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – initiated by the filmmaker and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio (M-G-M), Louis B. Mayer. The first Academy awards or Oscars was held in 1929 with a banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom room with about 270 attendees. To honor and award film productions, movies had been put into category with their special features such as Film Editing, Music Scoring, and Song. These were added in 1935. The first Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress Academy Awards were presented for film performances in 1963. It was only in 1941 that the category of documentary appeared on the ballot.

In 1944, the Academy made a radical change. The Oscar Ceremony was held for the first time at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood boulevard in Hollywood. Since that day, everything had been evolving until the Oscar went global in 1969. For the very first time, the Oscars were broadcast around the world and now the show has already reached movie fans in more than 200 countries.

Sources: oscars.org/ TIME/ USA Today / IMDb