Road 2 English: Oscar

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Actors Criticize 'White' Oscars for Lack of Diversity

This is a news story brought to you by VOA English Learning

For the second year in a row, the Oscar nominations failed to recognize any minority actors. As a result, some well-known actors and filmmakers are refusing to attend the Academy Awards ceremony this year. They are calling for a boycott. Find additional details in this NYT article.

Listen to the podcast below to find out why. After listening, can you name some of the actors mentioned in the audio?

Actor John Krasinski (L) and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Cheryl Boone Isaacs announce the nominees for the Best Actress in a Supporting Role during the nominations announcements for the 88th Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif

Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer

Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer
Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer.We can pull off being non-racist by being asleep in bed while black men are killed by police. We need to stop being non-racist, and start being anti-racist
Posted by The Guardian on Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Most of us, says Marlon James, are non-racist. While that leaves us with a clear conscience, he argues, it does nothing to help fight injustice in the world.

Searching for Sugar Man

This is one of the most incredible, unbelievable stories I've heard in my whole life. Beautiful strange story indeed transformed into an Oscar winning documentary in 2012.
In the 1990s two South Africans set out to discover what happened to their unlikely musical hero, the mysterious 1970s rock'n'roller, Rodriguez.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man: Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film directed by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts of two Cape Town fans in the late 1990s, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumoured death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true, and, if not, to discover what had become of him. Rodriguez's music, which never took off in the United States, had become wildly popular in South Africa, but little was known about him there.

On 10 February 2013, the film won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary at the 66th British Academy Film Awards in London, and two weeks later it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards in Hollywood.

On 9 May 2013, Rodriguez received an honorary doctorate – a Doctor of Humane Letters degree – from his alma mater Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan during WSU's 10 AM commencement ceremony.