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Oscars 2016 – The Diversity Issue

Wed, 02 Mar 2016
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Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony celebrated a unique year of film with some incredible winners (six for Mad Max: Fury Road!) and surprises (Mark Rylance over favourite Sylvester Stallone).

It was also the opportunity for Hollywood’s best and brightest to shed light on many of today’s huge issues which affect us all.  Notably, the supremely talented Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his well-deserved Best Actor academy award, taking the opportunity to use this platform to highlight a very real risk to our planet in front of the 34 million viewers, “Climate change is real – it’s happening right now. It is the most urgent threat right now to our entire species and we need to work now.”

Leo’s serious yet grateful demeanour was perfect to demonstrate the seriousness of the topic, but Chris Rock(ed) as host for quite apparently and humorously addressing the#Oscarssowhitecontroversy.

There’s all sorts of issues with inequality prevalent in today’s society; not just with race but with gender, as Chris Rock emphasised with his unique style of sarcasm, wit and pathos.   As he pointed out – why is there a separate Actor and Actress category? “Robert De Niro never said, ‘I should slow this acting down so Meryl Streep can catch up.'” What could have been awkward (we all cringed at the Jada Pinkett-Smith and Will Smith jokes) was in fact hilarious, and laughter is the key a lot of the time to bringing issues to light to a wide, diverse audience in order to strengthen the fight and bonds between communities.

Companies across the world are waking up to issues with diversity and within the HR community, it is a huge topic and one which our clients within the media and creative industries are fully aware.  Moving forward, we will see thought-leaders in this field making waves with huge improvements to ensure diversity and inclusion through race, gender, disability, age and salary.  We are proud to partner our clients who have this at the forefront of their HR agenda and we at Impact consider all this within our CSR commitments.

For more information on Impact’s CSR Policy, please contact a member of our CSR committee.  More details on Leo’s fight against climate change can be found here http://leonardodicaprio.org/ and Chris Rock’s best (most devastating) gags here http://www.ew.com/article/2016/02/28/chris-rock-oscar-jokes.