#OscarsSoWhite Activist April Reign Is Going To The Oscars!
"I feel immense pride and a sense of coming full circle, back to the where it all began,” she says of her invitation to attend this year's Academy Awards.
It was just over four years ago that April Reign dropped a bomb on Hollywood when she tweeted the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to bring attention to the lack of people of color with acting nominations at the 2015 Academy Award ceremony.
And now the activist gets to go to the very ceremony that she once criticized, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Reign recently accepted an invitation from the Academy to attend her first Oscars ceremony.
“After creating the hashtag and working for almost five years to turn it into a movement that not only changed the Academy but made its way into so many other industries, I feel immense pride and a sense of coming full circle, back to the where it all began,” she told THR. “The work continues, but I am thrilled to be able to celebrate the incremental progress that has been made, even if only for a night.”
According to the THR, the Academy has invited 322 new members in 2015, 683 in 2016, 774 in 2017 and 928 in 2018 following the #OscarSoWhite campaign.
Reign never expected her tweet to launch the type of change it has, she told ESSENCE in 2016.
“There was no way to have expected this thing to be international the way it is. I was sitting in my family room watching the nominations last year and it was frustrating. I just tweeted out, “#OscarsSoWhite, they asked to touch my hair.” That was my very first tweet,” she said. “This is an issue that affects women. It affects all people of color, not just Black people. It affects different sexual orientations, it affects the disabled people.”
