From 50 Shades of Grey to 4 Shades of Brown: This Year’s Golden Globes

It’s the New Year and Elan is thinking of brand new gym memberships we’ll never use, personal budgets we’ll screw up by March…and of course awards season.

The combo of The New Year and awards season then had us thinking about how much progress Arabs and South Asians have made in the entertainment industry. Since the Golden Globes is the first big award of the year, we decided to research its history of nominating Arabs and South Asians.

Like so many New Year resolution diets, our hope went up in smoke. We researched from 2005 to 2016 and we only found a handful of brown people nominees scattered throughout those years.

Here’s what we found;

A.R. Rahman, India’s prolific song-writer, producer, and composer won two years in a row (2009 & 2010) for Best Original Score for the movies, “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours”. In 2013, Archie Punjabi won Best Supporting Actress in a Television role for The Good Wife.

Nothing, from 2005-2006. Zilch. But, if we are REALLY digging deep, in 2007, Tony Shaloub, (a second-generation Lebanese American) was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series for “Monk”.

Does the fictional character “Borat, count? Probably not.

That brings us to 2016- and there are actually four “brown people” nominated for the 73rd Golden Globes—the Egyptians, Iranians and Indians have pulled through.

Rami Said Malek, is nominated this year for best performance by an actor in a television series drama for his role in “Mr. Robot”. Rami plays a young computer programmer who suffers from social anxiety disorder and compensates by forming social connections through hacking. Rami, himself, was born to Egyptian parents and raised in California. As an Egyptian-American actor, he’s been upset previously by being type-cast in “terrorist” roles – as are many Arab American actors.

Rami is pleased that his character of Elliot in “Mr. Robot”,

“…is a guy who could be anyone in the world. The fact that I’m of Egyptian descent speaks to the changes that are hopefully happening in Hollywood these days.”

Popular Indian American comedian Aziz Ansari has been nominated this year for best actor in a television series in a musical or comedy for “Master of None”. In this semi-autobiographical role, Aziz plays Dev, an Indian American actor who is best known for his work in a Go-Gurt commercial.

Aziz’s real parents, Shoukath and Fatima Ansari, make several appearances on the show and have said they were “very enthusiastic” about their debut to acting.

Finally, “50 Shades of Grey” helped push this year’s Golden Globe Nominees to include “4 Shades of Brown”.

Super producer/composer/song writers—Ilya Salmanzadeh and Ali Payami, both of Iranian descent, are nominated for best original song – motion picture for “Love Me Like You Do” from the soundtrack of “50 Shades of Grey”.

So, relative to past years, it was a good year for Arabs and South Asians in American TV. But relative to the overall number of nominees, it’s a pretty small number.

So let’s rally and “resolve” to support these communities and help to make that number higher and higher in years to come.

Elan congratulates and will be rooting for all of the nominees above.