Diversity In Oscar Acting Nominees Matches Last Year; All Are First-Time Nominees

Seven out of the 20 acting Oscar nominees across Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were represented this year by people of color. For all of them — Lily Gladstone, Danielle Brooks, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, America Ferrera, Colman Domingo, Sterling K. Brown and Jeffrey Wright — it’s their first career Oscar nomination.

That ties with the same number of diverse acting nominees across acting categories at last year’s Oscars, however it’s down from the nine nominees of color in 2020.

Last year those actors of diverse backgrounds counted Brian Tyree Henry for Causeway and Ke Huy Quan for Everything Everywhere All at Once in Best Supporting Actor (the latter won); Ana de Armas for Blonde and Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once in Best Actress (the latter won), and Stephanie Hsu from Everything Everywhere All at Once, Angela Bassett from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Hong Chau from The Whale in Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis would go on to win).

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Of this year’s seven, the Best Supporting Actress category is the most diverse with The Color Purple’s Danielle Brooks, Barbie’s America Ferrera and The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Ferrera becomes the first-ever Oscar nominee of Honduran descent in any category; she is also the ninth Latina nominee in the category. Last year in Best Supporting Actress there were also three diverse nominees in Hsu, Chau and Bassett.

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As Deadline told you this AM, Lily Gladstone became the first Native American nominated for Best Actress for her turn as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

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In Best Actor, there’s Colman Domingo for Rustin, who becomes the first Afro Latino nominated in the category. He’ll compete against Black nominee Jeffrey Wright for Amazon MGM’s American Fiction.

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In Best Supporting Actor, there’s Brown from American Fiction, making it the first time that a Black lead actor was nominated alongside a supporting actor from the same movie. In previous years, among Black actors from the same film, there’s been Oscar nominees for actor and supporting actress, as well as actress and supporting actress.

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Domingo and best supporting actress nominee Jodie Foster (Nyad), who are openly LGBTQ actors, played LGBTQ characters on screen. That’s the first time that’s occurred in Oscar nom history.

In Best Picture, a record three women filmmakers saw their movies get nominated: Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and Celine Song’s Past Lives. Triet was only female filmmaker recognized in the directing category.

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In original score, Laura Karpman, the composer of American Fiction, became one of five women recognized in the Oscar slot in the last 25 years.

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