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Hollywood films fail to represent 'real-life diversity' in US

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ANI London
Last Updated : Aug 06 2014 | 3:35 PM IST

A new study has revealed that Hollywood films still do not completely reflect diversity in US.

It was found that in 2013, Hispanic actors played only 4.9 percent of speaking parts in movies, despite making up more than 16 percent of the population and Black actors were cast only in 14.1 percent of roles and 17 percent of films had no black speaking characters, the BBC reported.

However, Steve McQueen did become the first black director to win an Oscar for his film '12 years A Slave' in 2014 but there were still only 1.1percent more black characters on the big screen than in 2007. It was also found that if a film had a black director, more black actors were likely to be involved.

The report stated that Hispanics were "clearly the most underserved" racial or ethnic group, even after they bought a quarter of all movie tickets in the US, and command about 1 trillion dollars in spending power. In fact more than 37 percent of Hispanic female characters were shown either naked or partially naked.

It was also mentioned that despite the changing demographics of the US population, films still portray a homogenised picture of the world.

The report suggested that this illustrates how existing cultural stereotypes might still govern how characters from different backgrounds are shown on screen.

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First Published: Aug 06 2014 | 3:19 PM IST

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