The membership changes were announced Friday in a statement, with Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs adding, “The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up”.
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Current members can still sponsor new ones, but voting rights will only last for 10 years and members can only retain them after that if they’ve remained active in the industry during that decade. Only those members who have had three 10-year terms or have won or been nominated for an Oscar will have lifetime voting rights.
The 58-year-old director is among those who have publicly criticised the nominations list for the upcoming Academy Awards, which has been slammed for their lack of diversity.
On Jan.14, the Academy announced that for a second straight year, all 20 nominations in the main acting categories went to white actors. He said that it was time that the Academy did something about the diversification issue. To help Hollywood along in its struggle for inclusion, the National Urban League, the National Action Network and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation announced they’ve requested a meeting with the academy and film industry leaders.
The Academy Awards changes its rules and has unanimously decided – in the wake of criticism of this year’s Oscars – to commit to doubling the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020. It’s also taking “immediate action to increase diversity by adding new members…to its executive and board committees where key decisions about membership and governance are made”.
The new rules will be applied retroactively to current Academy members.
“When we talk about diversity, you do it in the casting of the movie, not the casting of the show”, Damon said, suggesting that having a diverse cast of actors playing the parts is more important than having a diverse filmmaking team working behind the scenes.
Not only are the nominees exclusively caucasian but a trend in those who attend the Oscars on February 28 might be primarily white as well. It wasn’t until the 1980s that black actors began to be nominated on a regular basis; it’s been especially tough for black women.
“So what we really need is people in positions to greenlight those stories, not a hunk of metal”. The only place to me, or one of the places where it comes into play that’s tricky, is that these nominations actually translate into dollars and they translate into people’s ability to parlay.
Spike Lee also expressed qualified support for the new measures, describing them as “a start”.
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Nelson Mandela’s daughter Maki, meanwhile, has called the protests about the lack of black actors in this year’s nominees “very significant”.
