Anything Goes : Academy Unveils Major Rule Changes To Diversify Oscars by Richard "RB" Botto

Does the Academy assume that women will vote for women and minorities (their wording) will vote for minorities? Where "Hollywood" needs to show diversity is jobs - not in awards. Will Smith has never once worked with a black director - and he has director approval on most of his projects. But he's boycotting the awards for not having one black director nominated. And this "not active for ten years" rules seems ageist. It also assumes that a white woman who worked in the industry for 40 years but not in the last ten will not vote for a woman or minority. Older women have a hard enough time getting work in this industry. Now the Academy want to take away their voting rights after 30/40 plus years of work.

absolutely.

D has it absolutely right here. The issue is not with the AMPAS membership, but with those who cast and finance films. The reality is that art is subjective and if we acknowledge that, then we must also acknowledge that some performances and the work of those behind the scenes will be judged accordingly. As a producer, and member of both the PGA and SAG-AFTRA, I have never cared whether potential nominees were male, female, black, white or other when voting. I simply vote for the films or performances (in the case of the SAG Awards) that moved me. In case you aren't aware, this is how the voting at both the PGA and AMPAS works: The preferential system of tabulation is used in final voting. You are voting essentially for one production, and the preferential system ensures that your vote will be cast – in order of your listed preferences – for the nominee for whom it can do the most good. If, for example, the highest ranked production on your ballot receives almost no support from other voters, you have not "wasted" your vote. The system moves on and casts your vote for your second listed production, and so on. When you have reviewed the list of nominees, you rank each film from 1 -10 by typing your rankings into the ballot. You rank your first choice as "1" and your last choice as "10". You need not fill in all 10 rankings, however, the more preferences you indicate, the greater the certainty that your ballot will influence the winning nominee. In other words, there may very well have been a lot of people who voted Idris Elba for BEASTS in the actors branch of the AMPAS (by far the group of voters), but based on the preferential system, if more people voted for, say, DiCaprio (who at this point has to be the odds-on favourite to win, well... then DiCaprio take a nomination and Idris doesn't. Personally, I didn't vote for Idris for SAG because, while I generally love his work, I somehow felt that I'd seen the film before... it all felt very derivative and while I also generally like the work of Fukunaga, BEASTS didn't blow my mind. Ok. How about Smith? CONCUSSION, for me, was awful. Boring and poorly done. To me, Smith is bowing to his wife here (sad) and whining because he bothered to pull out his Nigerian accent. Sorry. Not worth a nomination. The only two on-camera performances that, for me, had a shot in terms of black talent would have been Elba and Jason Mitchell (as Easy-E in COMPTON), but the fact is that there were better performances this year. CREED never had a shot. I didn't love the film nearly as much as everyone else, and again, both Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler are tremendous talents and very young men... who will turn in even better work. Speaking of young, should Michael Keaton or Michael Caine (who was an early favourite for YOUTH, a film I loathed) boycott and tweet #OscarsSoYoung because, with the exception of Stallone there are no AARP member in the nominees? Essentially, in my opinion, the AMPAS leadership is bowing to a ridiculous cry of racism when the truth is that the issue stems from the start of the cinematic process and not from some systematic move by its membership to disallow minorities to be nominated. In short, get a great role, do great work and you'll be nominated regardless of race. All the rest is just absurd whining.

Could it be the lack of nominees from certain groups was because there were none worthy from those groups? No! It's always discrimination.

I would not touch this topic with a ten foot pole. Jacob Pinski, a ten foot Pole said he wouldn't touch it either.

Nothing good will come from mandated changes made by the Academy.

All good points as is the surprisingly civil and broad ranging commentary section after the linked article. This will go on and the Academy and everything associated with it will be lessened because of it. When excellence is not to be the only criteria, then the Academy’s relevance must be brought into question. Noise will be made and then it will go away. What it leaves in its wake will be a shadow of what it was meant to be. Restricting voting privileges and then assuming your chosen voters will only vote for people who you want them to is both insulting and naive. Seems the president of the Academy is looking to choose voters that will return the choices she wants and not perhaps voting for what they thought was best. I hope that voting in the Academy would also be limited to those who are or were involved in the actual production of motion picture. This is people who work in the industry in a career that has an Oscar for the “best” in that category, i.e. Best Actress, Make-up, Producer, etc. Note that there are no categories for best Teamster parking a porta-pottie. no Oscar for the production accountant, nor for the best PA making photocopies in a supporting role all of whom work in the industry but are not deemed to play that critical integral role. Why is the head of the Academy allowed to be there as she is a publicist? Publicists don’t play a critical integral role in making the movies so why should she have any say at all in this matter? If the answer is because she was voted in, then remember the same voting group votes for Oscar nominees which she so vehemently disagrees with. Obviously she should resign her position as she was elected by people she thinks shouldn’t vote and she shouldn’t be eligible anyway. I wish the Academy response would not have merely moved the focus from one identifiable issue to another. In this case from racist and sexist to ageist. Moving a problem doesn’t solve the problem. A quick response to a PR crisis by a publicist should not have high expectations of long term success.

Lets introduce a quota system......that's worked so well in other fields.

Excellent post, Andrew. The Academy's response comes off as an insult; to older members who have spent their life in the business and are now retired and to "women and minorities". The assumption that they will vote for their own and thus diversify the nominees comes off as demeaning to those hard working professionals.

What I always say when I read that somebody was robbed of a nomination is please be explicit about which nominated person (or film) should be chucked out of the list to make room for somebody else. I mean, if somebody wants to say "Straight out of Compton" was more deserving than "The Revenant", then say it. (Since I don't want to see either of those films, I honestly don't know!) It was only two years ago (two!) that "12 Years a Slave" won the Oscar for Best Film, so are we to believe that suddenly since then the Academy is prejudiced? They vote for "12 Years a Slave", then become completely racist the next two years? There are a lot of mediocre films out there--plenty of them do not deserve nominations. I say call them out specifically! Say "this nominated film is mediocre and less deserving of nominations than this other one". Nobody wants to go out on a limb and say that, so we get a generalized complaint of racism. Personally, I think the Oscars reflect sexism a whole lot more than racism....