雅思课外读物--Why Hollywood refuses actors of color?

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雅思备考时，多看一些杂志报刊的文章，对 提高英语水平还是很有帮助的，而且以为地追求题海战术，人很容易疲惫，这时候看点文章什么的最好了！今天跟大家分享的雅思课外读物可是关于好莱坞的：Why Hollywood refuses actors of color?这句话的意思是“好莱坞为什么不拍非白人影片？”，一起来看吧！

Four of the year’s 25 top-grossing movies(票房收入最高的电影)star a minority in a

leading role. All but two had white directors. And the number of minority actors

forecasters expect to get Oscar nominations(提名)can be counted on one

hand.(有望获得奥斯卡提名的少数族裔演员屈指可数。)

In the year since the Sony Pictures hack exposed racially insensitive emails

and cast a spotlight on Hollywood’s diversity problem, movie studios have shown

little progress in hiring more people of color for their casts and crews.

The industry is ignoring a gold mine. Every year for the past half-decade,

the average white American has bought a ticket to fewer films than the average

black, Hispanic or Asian moviegoer, industry data shows. Though 37 percent of

the U.S. population, minorities bought 46 percent of the $1.2 billion in tickets

sold in the United States last year.

Some of the year’s biggest surprises had diverse actors and small budgets but

ended up dominating(控制)the silver screen. For five straight weeks ending in

September, movies with predominately(占绝大多数地)black casts topped the box

office(票房), including the Christian drama “War Room,” thriller “The Perfect Guy”

and rap biography “Straight Outta Compton,” which has made $200 million on a $28

million budget to become the highest-grossing biopic of all time.

More recently, “Creed,” a “Rocky” spinoff starring Michael B. Jordan and

directed by Ryan Coogler — both 20-something black men who led the 2013 critical

darling “Fruitvale Station” — has triumphed with $72 million at the box office

and one of the best opening weekends in the boxing franchise’s(连锁加盟店)40-year

history.

High-profile hires of actors such as Jordan in “Creed” and John Boyega in

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” have remained the exception in a Hollywood that

has shown only stuttering(结巴的;不持续的)progress over the past year in getting

more-diverse talent into blockbuster(大片) roles.

(《信念》中用乔丹当演员，以及《星球大战：力量苏醒》用约翰.勃耶加，如此高调的行为在好莱坞仅仅是例外而已。过去的一年中，在使用非白人演员出任大片主角方面，好莱坞没有取得什么大的进展。)

But that lack of diversity, long a social issue, is increasingly becoming a

business issue, and analysts say the success of movies such as “Creed” and

“Compton” could make a big difference in persuading Hollywood’s dealmakers to

better reflect the multicultural country it represents.

“Oftentimes it’s not emotional appeal, it’s the spreadsheet(电子表格;财务报表)that

can make the change,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst with

industry researcher Rentrak. “Show the empirical evidence. Look at the

profitability of all these movies written, directed, produced by African

Americans. That’s how you get the attention of Hollywood — or at least the

people holding the purse strings.”

For all its grandeur(辉煌), Hollywood is a fiscally conservative industry, and

studios and financiers have long proved hesitant to invest tens of millions of

dollars into projects backed by filmmakers they do not know.

(好莱坞尽管辉煌无比，但涉及到金钱方面却很保守，长期以来，电影公司和投资人都不愿意将数千万美金投入到一些他们不熟悉的制片人支持的项目。)

Very often, the people they know share their skin tone(肤色). In 2013, more

than 92 percent of movie studios’ senior executives, 82 percent of film

directors and 88 percent of film writers were white, UCLA researchers said.

“When I go to [film studio] offices, I see no black folks except for . . .

the security guard,” director Spike Lee said while accepting an honorary Oscar

last month at the Governors Awards. “It’s easier to be the president of the

United States as a black person than to be the head of a studio.”

That monolithic(整体的;似铁板的)whiteness has created a chicken-and-egg problem:

Talented actors and filmmakers of color are routinely shut out because they were

never given a chance in the first place.

Over the past year, “my sense is not a lot has changed,” said Darnell Hunt,

director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. “The

people who control the industry are still very reluctant to take a risk on

untested talent — that is to say, people of color.”

Of the top 100 films last year, 73 percent of all characters were white, and

only 17 of those movies starred nonwhite lead or supporting actors, University

of Southern California researchers found.

Minority audiences, of course, did not flood only minority films: People of

color bought more than 60 percent of the U.S. tickets to last year’s

“Transformers: Age of Extinction,” a $245 million blockbuster whose cast was

almost exclusively white.

The power of minorities’ spending, particularly in movies with more diverse

stars and stories, has become impossible to ignore. “Furious 7,” which made more

than $1 billion worldwide, pocketed 62 percent of its $350 million gross in the

United States from minority moviegoers. Notably, “Compton,” which far outpaced

financial projections, counted a box-office audience that was 75 percent

nonwhite.

“If you try to be diverse for the sake of being diverse, it’s going to fail,”

(如果你是为了多样化而去多样化，你一定会失败)Jeff Shell, the chairman of Universal Filmed

Entertainment, the studio behind “Compton,” told Variety last month. “The real

reason to do it is that it’s good business. Our audience is diverse.”

The debate over Hollywood diversity sharpened last winter after stolen

private emails between Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and movie producer

Scott Rudin revealed the two joking that President Obama would like only films

starring black actors: “I bet he likes Kevin Hart,” Rudin said. Both have since

apologized, and Pascal lost her job.

The Academy Awards solidified(加剧) the slight(轻慢)earlier this year when, for

only the second time since 1998, no actor of color was named among the Oscars’

20 acting nominees. Viewers chastised(指责)the Academy with the hashtag

#OscarsSoWhite, and the Oakland Tribune headlined the news “And the Oscar for

best Caucasian goes to . . .”