Calling out the Academy

         

 

     So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has new Diversity rules.  The Academy is limiting Best Picture award nominees -- beginning with 2024's slate of entries -- to those that can meet requirements that "encourage equitable representation on and off screen" by ensuring more people of color fill positions on a film set from the starring role to interns and everything in between.

 

     The Oscars have been around for 90 years and were never created for anyone other than white talent to thrive.  The Academy was created because one incredibly rich studio executive decided he needed a mansion right on the beach in Santa Monica. Louis B. Mayer, West Coast chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was born into 19th century Russia into poverty and became one of the highest-paid men in the United States by his early forties.  The only issue with constructing Mayer’s beachside chateau was that the studio laborers were in the midst of unionization, and that meant construction would be expensive. To get around that, he hired just a few skilled people from the studio, and outsourced the rest of the work for cheap.  But the ordeal made Mayer worry that the actors he employed would get the union spirit in their heads and cut into his profits. He figured it would be in his business’ best interest if there were an organization that could work out labor disputes in the studio’s favor. So he got a few of his like-minded industry friends together, and they created the Academy.

    In 1940, the year Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Academy Award, the Oscars were held in a "no blacks" hotel. After accepting her award, she was forced to sit at a segregated table, away from the rest of the "Gone With the Wind" cast.  We're waiting for a system created by white males to recognize the beauty and significance in movies made by women and people of color. That system is powered by voters who can't relate to what a movie like "Queen and Slim" means as much as they would a "Joker" movie or a Martin Scorsese film.     Of the 17 black actors who have won Academy Awards, five of them were recognized for roles that reinforce stereotypes about black people, from Cuba Gooding Jr. as a NFL player in "Jerry Maguire" to Octavia Spencer as a maid in "The Help."  But compare that to the number of Latin American and Asian American actors who've won Oscars and the stats become jarring: seven total. 

 

 

 

     It should come as a surprise to no one that Hollywood is run by (old) white men. It's been this way since the film industry's conception more than 100 years ago and it's this way today: Of the five major movie studios, only one is headed by a woman, Universal chairwoman Donna Langley, and she's white.  

    Part of the problem is that we don’t know who the members of the Academy actually are, and that poses some huge issues. The Academy has only recently started publicizing the names of the people it has invited to join the voting body in an effort to be more transparent. But the organization hasn’t revealed who was in the Academy prior to the 2016 Oscars. That culture of secrecy means we can’t hold the voting body to account when they leave actors of color
and female directors off their ballot.

 

 

 

    As the gatekeepers of the Oscars, seen as the deciders of ‘good cinema’, one would expect to know more about the voting body than we currently do. In 2012, analysis from the Los Angeles Times found that the median age of the Academy voting body was 62. It also revealed that just 14 per cent of the membership were under the age of 50. We have seen the number of people of colour included in the Oscars voting body jump from eight per cent in 2015 to 16 per cent in 2019, after the Academy announced that it would be introducing sweeping changes to the awards following the 2016 controversy. While this does mean that the number of non-white voters in the Academy is up, it also means that the vast majority of the Academy is still white – 84 per cent, according to figures from 2019.

     For years, the Academy has refused to release a list of its Oscar voters, but if it decides to expose who each voter is and how they have aggregately nominated, it will allow the Academy to scrutinise how the body votes and help answer some big questions. Are white voters voting for actors of colour? Are male directors voting for female directors? Who missed out on a nomination? How have certain demographics voted? Are voters nominating their friends? The Oscars will only begin to tackle its biases when the Academy becomes more transparent about who members are, and how they’re voting.

    The Irishman is a great movie — but it didn’t have to overcome any hurdles to get nominated because a mob drama starring a legendary white guy actor (Robert De Niro) and directed by one of the greatest filmmakers (Martin Scorsese) was always going to be considered. It was “an Oscar movie” from the second it was announced, and until the Academy can find a way to dislodge this line of thinking, it’s going to be hard to avoid situations where the lineups are as non-diverse as the 2020 nominee list is. And a big part of why the “That’s an Oscar movie” narrative takes hold is because of predictors who artificially winnow the field before anybody has seen the movies.

 

     Academy members themselves have the power to expand what kinds of movies are considered Oscar contenders. One step would be to reject the preemptive hand-waving doled out to so many acclaimed films,  many of them artsier or smaller-scale, that supposedly will never play with Oscar voters for little reason other than tradition.” Until Oscar voters acknowledge—and reconfigure—their circumscribed visions of artistry, the rest of Hollywood (and the moviegoing public) will be subject to the same wearying cycles.