Host Chris Rock speaks at the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has been one of the most talked about topics since the nominations for the 88th Academy Awards were announced on Jan. 14.

About an hour before the ceremony started, the hashtag already had 3.3 million hits on Twitter alone, which continued to increase during the show as many announced their boycott of the awards due to the lack of ethnic diversity of the nominees.

Coming from a non-American perspective, diversity, as an issue that is openly discussed in daily conversations, is definitely something new. My understanding of why diversity matters in the Academy is that as a form of art, movies need to be accessible to a wide audience, and also represent the diversity of that audience, which will consist of people from various backgrounds.

Quoting Aristotle, the purpose of art is '€œto represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance'€.

Not all of the nominated actors and actresses are white (Alejandro Inarritu is the only Latino nominated in the director category), but the average profile of an Academy voter is a 63 year-old white male. This fact stands in stark contradiction to the comment made by Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaac during a red-carpet interview, who said that the Academy had been working for some time to include more people into its 7000-member organization and that it is taking more action to increase diversity.

But is this really the main issue of diversity in Hollywood?

Remember Viola Davis'€™ speech at the Emmy last year? She said that: '€œThe only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.'€

Could it be that the main problem be that there are simply not enough stories out there to significantly increase diversity?

The summary of a quick conversation I had with a couple of friends when an African-American actor was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, was that these roles are always those with which white Americans can sympathize. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'€™o in 12 Years A Slave? Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in The Help? The pattern is visible.

Even in his opening monologue, this year'€™s host Chris Rock blatantly expressed the main reason why diversity has become an issue: opportunity.

Rock did a fantastic job in introducing the issue light-heartedly without putting all the blame on the Academy itself. He touched on Jada'€™s useless boycott and called the Oscars the '€œWhite People'€™s Choice Award'€.

It takes a big heart and courage to talk about the issue of diversity in a comedy monologue in that kind of situation. Is it fair to say that Rock nailed it?

I believe he did.

In popular art forms, I believe that diversity is important as the representation of a community.

David Savran, an American Theater scholar, once said that an art form possesses a high amount of identity politics that contain extensive histories and culture to provide various coding of texts on popular culture as a form of assimilation for marginalized social groups.

That alone is a good enough reason for why diversity is an important part of the essence of an art form.

Now that the Emmy and even this year'€™s Tony Awards have increased the diversity of their nominees, I think it'€™s about time for the Academy to include more people from ethnic minority groups as nominees and voters to create a more colorful Oscars in the coming years.

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Adithya Pratama (@adith1801) is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer currently pursuing a degree in food and theater studies in the greatest city in the world.

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