New Academy President Pushes For More Diverse Voting Members : Code Switch : NPR: For the first time, this year's best director Oscar could go to a Mexican (Alfonso Cuaron, for Gravity) or a black Brit (Steve McQueen, for 12 Years a Slave). That film's lead actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor, is also in the running for an award; so is his Kenyan co-star Lupita Nyong'o, who was born in Mexico. This year's nominees are diverse, but the people who vote for the Oscars are not.
In fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continues to be an exclusive club that is 93 percent white, 76 percent male, with an average age of 63,
"I think people assumed the Academy was pretty homogeneous, and it turned out it was even more so than the worst assumptions," says journalist John Horn. He and a team of L.A. Times reporters tracked down and spoke with most of the roughly 6,000 members of the Academy.
