In an ideal world, I wouldn't care about the composition of Star Wars Episode VII. It wouldn't matter that there are currently two women to the eleven men, and of the thirteen known cast members so far, only one is a person of colour. In an ideal world, all that would be important would be whether the story was good, and I could safely assume that the people cast were picked because they fit the part best through their acting skills, and their ability to be a believable family member to whoever they're supposed to be related to. In an ideal world, each individual film could be evaluated solely on its own merits.
We don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world where, according to a study by USC, of the 100 top grossing films of 2012 only 28.4% percent of speaking characters were women. According to the New York Film Academy, women buy half the movie tickets in the United States. The same USC study found that black or African-Americans represented 10.8 percent of all speaking characters, while Hispanics represented 4.2 percent and Asians 5 percent. According to the 2010 census, Hispanics represent 15% of the US population, African Americans 13% and Asian Americans 4.4%. It's worth noting that someone meets the role of "speaking character" by having one line.
The people calling for diversity are not trying to say that every single movie must represent the ethnic make-up of the United States in their casting, at the expense of realism or storytelling. What they are trying to point out is that, despite the fact that movies with a greater than 20% minority cast made significantly more money worldwide than the films for which that figure was 10% or lower, the aggregate of movies do not reflect the audience that watches them.
The Avengers is a movie I enjoyed thoroughly, I thought all the actors did a fantastic job. The Avengers taken solo is not necessarily problematic. The Avengers as one movie of hundreds that fails to represent my gender in any proportional way? That is. Failing the Bechdel test does not make a movie bad. Significant numbers of mainstream movies that all fail the Bechdel test makes our industry bad.
People complain about the artificiality of forcing diverse or egalitarian casting on any particular movie. They talk about how tired they are of hearing the same old refrain to everything they hold dear from their childhoods that is getting redone today. Well, most of us are tired of talking about it. We've been patient, we've hoped for things to improve organically, for the makers of movies to become more diverse, and more comfortable with bringing well realised female and minority characters to the screen. It hasn't happened. According to the above study, the trends of the past decade are not optimistic for increasing the diversity of either the actors on screen or the filmmakers behind the screen.
So yes, we are forced to start calling out individual movies for their casting decisions. We are forced to be vocal about the fact that good storytelling and diverse casting are not mutually exclusive, and that directors and producers should be making a deliberate effort to pursue both in order to bring us to the point where diversity and equality is so instinctual that we do not need to worry about the fact that one movie focuses on superheroes that all happen to be white. We must raise questions when a movie set in a galaxy that is supposed to be diverse and relatively egalitarian in terms of species, gender and race announces a cast where only 15% are women. If we do not, how are we ever going to reach a point where we can stop talking about race and gender?
Yes, it is likely that several of the men cast will be playing aliens or robots (who couldn't be female because?), and I'm thrilled that the cast from the original trilogy will be returning, even if their numbers contribute to the disproportionate representation. It may even be that there is at least one unannounced female cast member (bringing us up to 21% women). That does not invalidate the questions and concerns the fans are raising now. It does not make this conversation we are trying to have invalid or unimportant.
What people on both sides of the argument fail to acknowledge is that consciously thinking about diversity is not the goal. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to. In order to reach that ideal world, however, we do.
Edit: It's been pointed out to me that Oscar Isaac is Guatemalan.
