Last Friday, the Academy rolled out a series of aggressive new measures to its voting rules and organizational structure, which are aimed at doubling the number of female and minority members by the year 2020.
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“The issue is not the Academy”, Goldberg said, in reference to critics of the organization’s history of unapologetic whiteness.
The Academy’s Board of Governors said the changes are created to “make the Academy’s membership, its governing bodies, and its voting members significantly more diverse”. In other words, if a current member has not been active in the last 10 years they can still qualify by meeting the other criteria.
The academy said it also would augment its process by which current members sponsor newcomers into the organization by launching “an ambitious global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”.
The makeup of the academy’s membership has always been secret; in 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis showing 94 percent of voting members were white and hundreds of members hadn’t worked in movies in decades. High-profile performers and creators like Spike Lee, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith are boycotting this year’s ceremonies, and everyone from George Clooney to Robert Redford has commented on the larger movie industry’s approach to diversity and advocacy in recent weeks. The academy did not list specific numbers for the new membership goals.
The announced changes are an attempt to push out the old guard and make the voting Academy younger and more reflective of the population.
There is historical precedent for Boone Isaac’s efforts to change the academy’s membership. One might think after reading these that they were copied and pasted from the 1970s voting record, but do not be mistaken, these are from only a few years ago.
“I’m hoping in 12 months or so we can look back and say this was a watershed moment, and thank God we put that right”, McQueen, whose film 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture in 2013, told the Guardian in an interview published Sunday.
Looking to tamp down this firestorm, academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs wisely – and quickly – released a statement, a mea culpa of sorts.
Damon said the move is “a wonderful first step”.
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“If it’s not on the screen, you can’t vote for it”, she said. But “active” is an imprecise, potentially fraught term in a Hollywood where even the most successful players can go years without a project getting off the ground. I just became a member of the Academy this year.
