Actress Gina Rodriguez has launched a new social media campaign to promote Latino actors in an effort to increase diversity both in the entertainment industry and at the Oscars.
On Monday, the 31-year-old Jane the Virgin star took to Instagram to launch #MovementMondays, a campaign that highlights the work of one Latino actor or actress per week and asks the Latino community to support that actor.
“With all this Oscar Talk and lack of diversity I decided to start a movement and speak from the perspective of a Latina American who desires to see more Latinos on screen,” Rodriguez wrote in the first #MovementMondays post on Instagram this week.
“There are 55 million Latinos in this country and although we all come from various backgrounds our unity can make a movie explode at the box office or a tv show soar to the highest viewers possible. The better these projects do financially, the more money they will spend on putting Latinos In blockbuster films, as leads in tv shows Etc.”
For her first post, Rodriguez chose Guatemalan-American actor Oscar Isaac for his role in last year’s sci-fi sleeper hit Ex Machina. The film picked up two Academy Award nominations this year for its screenplay and visual effects, but none for Isaac, who also starred in last month’s box-office behemoth Star Wars: The Force Awakens and won a Golden Globe for his role in the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero.
“Oscar Isaac, in my opinion had an Oscar worthy performance in this film,” Rodriguez wrote. “Let’s start making noise with where it matters most, where we put our dollars. Go support these films, watch these shows (mine is on tonight by the way, shameless promotion feel free to watch on the CW) and we can take making a change into our own hands.”
Rodriguez’s campaign comes as the issue of diversity in Hollywood has exploded with the renewed #OscarsSoWhite controversy. For the second consecutive year, all 20 Academy Award nominees in top acting categories are white. The outrage around the nominations led to calls for a boycott of the annual awards show, and the Academy announced a dramatic overhaul of its voting rules on Friday in an effort to increase the diversity of its membership.
In a follow-up message on her Twitter account, Rodriguez expressed hope that the new Academy voting rules will successfully boost diversity among Oscar honorees. But she also wrote that calling the Academy racist is “not a solution.”
“Let us use our numbers and powerful voices to prove we support one another, to prove we can make a box office hit, to prove they need to support all the various Latino cultures in the media,” Rodriguez concluded. “That can be one part of the solution, so next year we have many movies that are worthy of Oscar contention!”
Check out Rodriguez’s full post above.