“Last Week Tonight” managed to get its opinion on the ongoing Oscar-nomination diversity debate through just under the wire Sunday, in the form of the show’s recurring “How Is This Still a Thing?” segment.
With the 2016 Academy Awards now less than a week away, the HBO news-satire series delivered a biting commentary on the issue of “Hollywood whitewashing, ” which, in their opinion, goes far beyond Oscar nominations.
The real problem isn’t so much the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but the fact that too often, “even when there are roles for non-white actors, they sometimes still get played by white people.”
For example, in “Exodus: Gods and Kings, ” the decision was made to cast “a guy from Australia [Joel Edgerton] and a guy from Britain [Christian Bale], pretending to be two guys from Egypt – a country in Africa.”
And don’t forget the upcoming “Gods of Egypt, ” which stars the Scottish Gerard Butler. All “LWT” had to say about that casting choice was, “Wow, that’s the whitest Egyptian since these four.”
The clip then cut to the Bangles in their 1986 video “.”
“LWT” also acknowledges that this is a problem that goes back decades, highlighting some of Hollywood’s most notorious casting missteps, such as Mickey Rooney in the role of Audrey Hepburn‘s Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in 1961′s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
