re: Will the Oscars include a token black person in every category now?

This is a pretty good chart for everyone on each side of the issue...



From an Economist article:

In fact, as our analysis of film casts and awards shows, the number of black actors winning Oscars in this century has been pretty much in line with the size of America's overall black population. But this does not mean Hollywood has no problems of prejudice. As the data show, it clearly does.

Oscar nominations have not dramatically under-represented black actors. Instead, they have greatly over-represented white ones. Blacks are 12.6% of the American population, and 10% of Oscar nominations since 2000 have gone to black actors. But just 3% of nominations have gone to their Hispanic peers (16% of the population), 1% to those with Asian backgrounds, and 2% to those of other heritage (see chart).

Black actors get speaking roles in rough proportion to their percentage of America’s population, according to a study of 600 top films from 2007-2013 at the Annenberg Center for Communication and Journalism. (See “film roles” in the chart above.) Again, Latinos and Asians do much worse. But blacks are under-represented in the roles that count for the Oscars, getting just 9% of the top roles since 2000, according to our own analysis. (We define “top roles” as the top three names on the cast-list on IMDb, an online film database, in films with a rating of 7.5 or greater, an American box-office gross of at least $10m, and which were neither animated nor in a foreign language.)

The underlined bold part is really the basis for this and stretching this argument to affirmative action...

The article states, African-Americans are adequately represented in Hollywood based on their population size, while Latinos (Hispanic Americans buy 25% of the nation’s cinema tickets) and Asians are not

...but the complaint is - African-Americans aren't getting Oscar-bait roles...

Everyone gets a trophy syndrome.

In a purely, capitalist business like Hollywood, choices are made for a myriad of reasons...mostly financial and box-office draw...that are beyond control of societal wants.

For most of the past 15 years, the Academy has largely judged what has been put in front of them: minority actors land 15% of top roles, 15% of nominations and 17% of wins. Once up for top roles, black actors do well, converting 9% of top roles into 10% of best-actor nominations and 15% of the coveted golden statuettes, a bit above their share of the general population.

So what to the chart, 73% of the actors are white, only 12.5% are black. So its obvious where the majority is coming from. So dumb.