The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced major changes to its membership structure Friday after a week of fierce criticism over the lack of diversity among this year’s Oscar nominees.
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Last week, Isaacs said she was “disappointed” that the acting nominees for the Oscars for all-white for the second year in a row and said on Monday, “The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership”.
Boone Isaacs acknowledged that the academy can only honor films that ultimately get made, but she thinks the changes announced today will “move the needle” in all aspects of filmmaking.
The board members will meet on January 26 and there are suggestions that Academy may return to 10 best-picture contenders among other changes, reported Variety.
The Academy said on Friday that, under its new criteria, members who have not worked actively in the film industry in the past few decades would no longer have voting rights for the Oscar awards.
She announced plans for an “ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”.
Meanwhile, other stars have confirmed they will not be attending the ceremony include Will Smith, his wife Jada Pinkett Smith and filmmaker Spike Lee.
Boone Isaacs – who is black and was once the only person of color on the academy’s board of governors – said Sunday that “the change is not coming as fast as we would like” and that “we need to do more, and better and more quickly”.
An Academy spokeswoman said the hope is that the reforms would lead to women making up 48 percent of total membership. The same rules will apply retroactively to existing members.
The changes not only expand diversity of future membership but change the demographic of current members.
Academy members will receive lifetime voting rights if their membership has been renewed three times, or have been nominated for an Academy Award. The members agreed that by 2020, the Academy will put in efforts to make its members and voter more diverse. If they fail to meet those standards, their “active” memberships become “emeritus” memberships, which means they retain all of their membership privileges save voting.
The Academy voting membership, according to an LA Times study in 2012, is 94 per cent Caucasian and 77 per cent male. Shame is a helluva motivator…
British film director Steve McQueen, who won an Oscar victor for “12 years A Slave”, told the BBC, “I think racism has a lot to do with it but also the whole idea of people not being adventurous enough in thinking outside of the box…of what they possibly think is the norm”.
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The diversity shortage caused a Twitter storm, with many reusing the hashtag from previous year, #OscarsSoWhite.
