64th Academy Awards for the third consecutive year. Three weeks earlier, in a ceremony held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on March 7, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Tom Hanks. "The Silence of the Lambs" won five awards including Best Picture. Other winners included "" with four awards, "Beauty and the Beast", "Bugsy", and "JFK" with two, and "City Slickers", "", "The Fisher King", "In the Shadow of the Stars", "Manipulation", "Mediterraneo", "Session Man", and "Thelma & Louise" with one. The telecast garnered more than 44 million viewers in the United States. The nominees for
Academy Awards favoring historical melodramas over critically acclaimed movies that depict current life issues. The Academy Awards have long received criticism over its lack of diversity among the nominees. This criticism is based on the statistics from every Academy Awards since 1929 which shows us that only 6.4% of academy award nominees have been non-white and since 1991, 11.2% of nominees have been non-white, with the rate of winners being even more polarizing. The 88th awards ceremony became the target of a boycott, popularized on social media by the #OscarsSoWhite, based on critics' perception that its all-white acting nominee list reflected bias.