Will Smith Will Boycott the Oscars, and Mark Ruffalo Is Considering It
Ruffalo is nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
A boycott is a boycott even if you don’t call it by name, and the 2016 Oscars boycott is gaining more steam. Will Smith, the un-nominated star of Concussion, announced that he will not be attending the ceremony, and Mark Ruffalo, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Spotlight, a film packed with white people that got several nominations, is on the fence about whether he’ll show. Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith had both previously said they would not be attending this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, but Lee insisted he wasn’t calling for an official boycott.
In an appearance on Good Morning America on Thursday, Smith said he would be joining his wife in skipping the Oscars. Pinkett Smith posted a video on Facebook earlier this week decrying lack of racial diversity among the Oscar nominees — all 20 acting nominations went to white performers — and said she would not be attending or watching the ceremony. On GMA, Smith insisted that his wife’s boycott had nothing to do with him personally, and that he didn’t know about the video until after it went live (!). “This is about children that are gonna watch this show, and they’re not going to see themselves represented,” he said.
In an interview for BBC Breakfast, Ruffalo was put a little bit on the spot by a BBC reporter who suggested that perhaps the nominee would skip the Oscars. The actor rolled with it:
“I’m weighing it. That’s where I’m at right now,” said Ruffalo. “I woke up in the morning thinking, what is the right way to do this? Because if you look at Martin Luther King’s legacy, what he was saying was, the good people who don’t act are much worse than the people, the wrongdoers, that are purposely not acting and don’t know the right way.”
Currently taking bets for who will be the next Hollywood star to back out of the Oscars. No pressure, Leo.
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