How diverse are the 2023 Best Picture nominees?
Published , before the 95th Academy Awards. Kept as it ran.
Overall, it's a pretty beige year. The overall score for the 2023 best picture casts is Beige Fever, with an overall beige score of 15.04 (where 12 is the lowest, due to methodological reasons). This is skewed, of course, by the large casts of small roles in films like Elvis and Triangle of Sadness. These films have a lot of beige, but they would not be considered beige films, per se.
On the other hand, you have the distinctly beige film Everything Everywhere All at Once, whose cast is actually 44% white—making the film seem, in absolute terms, much whiter than it actually is.
Overall, 364/538 (68%) of credited 2023 Best Picture castmembers are white.
Compare this to the IMDb Top 250 films, where 64% of castmembers are white, and you'll see that the Oscars this year are more white than the already very creamy IMDb Top 250. This may have to do with three of this year's ten nominees, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Banshees of Inisherin and Women Talking, all historical in nature, are 100% white. And perhaps this surprises no one: the Oscars remains, after all, perhaps the whitest cultural institution of any relevance.
But let's put serious statistics aside and get to the fun part. Will the beige-o-meter declare your favourite films of 2022 #Creamy, #BeigeFever, #Middlebeige, #DowntoBrown, or #WelcometoBeigewatch? Who knows? Oh wait, we know. That's, like, our whole thing.
Scroll down for more.
The Beige Index is the Bechdel test for race, measuring the level of ethnic diversity in popular films. You may be familiar with our coverage of the IMDb Top 250 films, where we ranked each of those films on our beige-o-meter™, and yes, we watched every film, all 500+ hours.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Dir. Edward Berger
OUTRAGEOUS. WHAT IS THAT, BLACKFACE? IS THAT BLACKFACE? CANCEL THEM.
Oh wait, it's just soot from battle, caked onto the face of a shell-shocked white boy? Our bad. Honest mistake.
SCORE: CREAMY
Cast
Avatar: The Way of Water
Dir. James Cameron
So the first Avatar was full of blue people—and don't worry, they're back. But don't think James hasn't been working hard to introduce diversity to this blockbuster franchise.
A lot has changed in fourteen years, and that's why Avatar: The Way of Water not only has blue people, but teal people too. Never mind that the teal people are coded to be the Na'vi equivalent of Pacific Island descent—nor that the main teal person is played by known white person Kate Winslet.
No, never mind any of that. Because we're less than a year out from Avatar 3 and boy howdy has James had some things to say about that upcoming masterpiece.
From his interview with French outlet 20 Minutes:
To show cultures different from those I have already shown... the fire will be represented by the ‘Ash People.’ I want to reveal the Na’vi from another angle because, for the moment, I have only shown their good sides. In the early films, there are very negative human examples and very positive Na’vi examples. In Avatar 3, we’ll have the opposite.
Here's our Beige Guarantee™: this whole 'Ash People' thing can only go well.
SCORE: BEIGE FEVER
Cast
The Banshees of Inisherin
Dir. Martin McDonagh
Ever hear of the Black Irish? It's a term Irish folk made up for people with black hair and dark eyes, obviously to sneakily try to claim beige status.
Colin Farrell's Black Irish. And by coincidence, so's one of The Beige Index's co-creators. We'll leave our lovely mugs right here and you can guess which one.
SCORE: CREAMY
Cast
Elvis
Dir. Baz Luhrmann
Choice Beigemeter™ exchange of the film, between Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Hank Snow (David Wenham) and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks)
Jimmie Rodgers Snow: Y'all have to hear this. Kids all over town are playing it everywhere I go.
Hank Snow: I hear Negro rhythms.
...
Jimmie Rodgers Snow: Well, this fella's on the Hayride tonight, after me in the newcomer spot.
Colonel Tom Parker: In Shreveport? No, they are not putting a colored boy on the Hayride.
Jimmie Rodgers Snow: That's the thing. He's white.
[Dramatic zoom on Colonel Tom Parker, dollar signs in his eyes]
Colonel Tom Parker: He's... He's white? He's WHITE.
SCORE: MIDDLEBEIGE
Cast
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Dir. Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
What’s Short Round and kicks ass with a fanny pack all over?
Ke Huy Quan (Waymond Wang), that’s who. This legend started out as a child actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Goonies (1985), before noping out in the 90s and transitioning to film production, with turns as a stunt choreographer on X-Men (2000) and The One (2001), before flirting with the auteur path as an assistant director on Wong Kar Wai’s sublime 2046 (2004).
As for the Ke Huy Quan-aissance, we have Crazy Rich Asians (2018) to thank for re-igniting his passion, by convincing him there might be more, and better, roles for Asian American actors this side of the century.
And what about the film’s lead? Well, there may just be exactly one actor in the entire multi-verse – beige or otherwise – who can sing, dance, fight, crack wise and deliver judgmental motherly pathos on cue and make us love her for it, and that’s Michelle Yeoh (Evelyn Wang).
SCORE: BEIGE FEVER
Cast
The Fabelmans
Dir. Steven Spielberg
In this lightly fictionalised tale of Steven Spielberg's adolescence, we glimpse the vicious anti-semitism the budding filmmaker suffered on his eventual path to auteurdom.
Watch as Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) films his cohort on Ditch Day and screens the finished picture at graduation: The beach. The waves. The gleaming idyll of white bodies. And in a therapist's wet dream, Fabelman frames his worst, most violent bully as impossibly mythic: the fastest, the greatest, the whitest of them all.
Uh huh. Where else have we seen a Great White on the beach? Y'all heard it here first: Spielberg's white bullies were the inspiration for the greatest summer blockbuster of all time. JAWS
SCORE: CREAMY
Cast
Tár
Dir. Todd Field
It's a tale as old as time. Toxic person gets canceled. But because of their fame, their whiteness, 'canceled' just means an inconvenient relocation to a beiger country where the power structures remain grossly intact. The new colonialism.
SCORE: CREAMY
Cast
Top Gun: Maverick
Dir. Joseph Kosinski
Tarantino once described the original Top Gun (1986) as one man's journey toward choosing the Gay Way.
We describe the journey from Top Gun to Top Gun: Maverick (2022) as Hollywood's journey to choosing the Beige Way, with a record cast of beige actors in this soaring legacyquel.
SCORE: BEIGE FEVER
Cast
Triangle of Sadness
Dir. Ruben Östlund
We're not going to lie. Watching this film unlocked a new kink.
Dolly De Leon is our new beige queen, and we are thirsty to be her useless male concubines. Anytime. CALL US DOLLY.
SCORE: BEIGE FEVER
Cast
Women Talking
Dir. Sarah Polley
Our Beige Index Intern (Alan) suggested this punchline: "White Women Talking".
Alan no longer works here.
SCORE: CREAMY
Cast
For more information, please contact The Beige Index team at info@thebeigeindex.com.
And if you want more beige-o-meter action you can check out our coverage of the IMDb Top 250 films.
The Whitewash
By Siang Lu (2022, UQP)
Wait, this isn't an Oscar-nominated film! It's a filthy book!
And on top of that, isn't this a blatant, nay, shameless plug for our co-creator Siang Lu's The Whitewash, also available as an audiobook and starring, for the first time in Australian publishing history, a cast of fourteen talented – and #beigefever – actors?
Surely this is against the rules! What's that? There are no rules? Oh well then carry on. Click the links to learn more. It'd make a perfect gift for your racist uncle!
