However his boycott settled in quite justly with the list of actors boycotting the Oscars this year due to the lack of diversification among the nominees for actors. It also agreed to establish three new board seats, with those representatives being nominated by the Academy president for three-year terms and approved by the board.
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As a member of the Academy himself, Damon praised Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs for taking positive action amid the scandal.
Members will receive lifetime voting rights after three ten-year terms; or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award. As many of you know, we have implemented changes to diversify our membership over the last four years.
She announced plans for an “ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”.
The roster of the 6,000 or so academy members has never been publicly disclosed, though a 2012 Los Angeles Times study found its members were almost 94 percent white and 77 percent male. Some may argue the Academy’s delayed response doesn’t exactly constitute “leadership”, but at least they’re offering some sort of substantive response as opposed to maintaining the silence that’s characterized years past.
Currently, Isaacs is the only African-American on the board of governors which is predominantly white.
The Academy Awards’ notorious lack of diversity isn’t anything new – everyone from Spike Lee to Lupita Nyong’o has spoken out about it. As part of the plan, the Academy promises to double its number of women and minority members by 2020.
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”.
Since the current slate of nominees was announced – once again, sans any black performers – academy voters have taken fire from all sides; a popular criticism being that, as a group, they are too old and too white.
“One could talk about percentages of certain people who are Academy members and the demographics and so forth, but the real issue is movies being made”, the director opined. Diversity in our industry is an important issue that needs to be addressed.
But to many of those who have lobbied for change, the academy’s announcement was seen as just a beginning: a first step in a growing movement for equal opportunity, on movie sets and award-show stages, in an industry that lags far behind matching the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of its moviegoing public. He said that he and his wife had decided not to attend the Oscars.
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The civil rights coalition promised that it would be ready to “present a clear and specific blueprint for moving forward” on accountability in the Academy and the film industry.
