For the second straight year, not a single actor of color has been nominated for an Academy Award. This has inevitably brought back the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, while spurring potential boycotts and promises of change from the Academy itself. Uber talented duo Joel and Ethan Coen, who are nominated once again this year for their "Bridge of Spies" original screenplay, believe that diversity in Hollywood is important, they just don't think the Oscars are particularly meaningful.
"[That's] assigning way too much importance to the awards," Joel told The Daily Beast in regards to the surrounding controversy this year. "By making such a big deal, you're assuming that these things really matter. I don't think they even matter much from an economic point of view. So yes, it's true - and it's also true that it's escalating the whole subject to a level it doesn't actually deserve."
"Diversity's important," Ethan added. "The Oscars are not that important."
The Coen Brothers have earned four Oscar wins and 10 total nominations together throughout their career. Their latest film, "Hail, Caesar!," follows Josh Brolin as a 1950s Hollywood fixer. Almost the entire cast is white, prompting The Daily Beast to ask if it's important for filmmakers to weigh diversity when telling a story.
"Not in the least!" Ethan said. "It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not."
"It's an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, 'Why aren't there this, that, or the other thing,'" Joel continued. "It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how stories are written. So you have to start there and say, 'You don't know what you're talking about.'"
"You don't sit down and write a story and say, 'I'm going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog' - right?" Joel said. "That's not how stories get written. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything about how stories get written and you don't realize that the question you're asking is idiotic. It's not an illegitimate thing to say there should be more diversity in an industry. But that's not what that question is about. That question is about something else."
"Hail, Caesar!" will arrive Feb. 5.
