‘It’s not quite #OscarsSoWhite, but it’s close enough’

Where are all the actors of color? asks Yohana Desta at Vanity Fair. Nineteen out of 20 actors nominated are white, the lone exception being Cynthia Erivo for Kasi Lemmons’s “Harriet.” Conspicuously absent were Jennifer Lopez, the entire cast of “Parasite” and Awkwafina, whose performance in “The Farewell” won a Golden Globe.

“The surprise is not the lack of diversity itself,” Ms. Desta writes. “Rather, it’s the academy’s sheer audacity to opt for a nearly all-white slate (again!), despite the fact that nearly a dozen actors of color have been a serious part of this year’s awards-season conversation.”

The academy’s choice not to nominate Ms. Lopez for “Hustlers” dispels the “illusion of inclusion in relation to Latinx people” that has recently permeated Hollywood, Carlos Aguilar writes in The Times. (In his review of “Hustlers,” A.O. Scott, The Times’s chief film critic, called Ms. Lopez’s performance a “finely calibrated,” “incandescent one-woman spectacle” that in some ways outshone the movie.)

But even more dispiriting than Ms. Lopez’s snub itself, Mr. Aguilar writes, are its implications for Latinx representation in the industry more broadly.

He notes that in the academy’s 92-year history, only a handful of American-born Latinx actors have ever been nominated for the highest acting honors.

Ms. Lopez would have been the first American Latina actress to get a nod since Rosie Perez in 1994.

The few Latin American actresses who have been shortlisted in recent memory played characters exhibiting “familiar tropes,” he adds. “What’s noteworthy about Ms. Lopez’s turn is that it does not abide by preconceived and clichéd expectations of who a Latinx woman is, specifically one born and raised in the United States,” he writes. “What does it mean that this type of Latinx character — not a maid, not a drug mule, not a nanny — wasn’t acknowledged by the academy?”

A version of that question has also been asked about Lupita Nyong’o, who won for best supporting actress in 2014 for her portrayal of Patsey in “12 Years a Slave,” but whose mirrored performance in Jordan Peele’s “Us” (“dazzling,” according to The Times; “virtuosic,” according to The New Yorker) went unrecognized this year.