Following a unanimous vote by its Board of Governors on Thursday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a series of sweeping changes to their membership and voting policies today in response to widespread outrage over the lack of diversity among not only the Academy’s members but also this year’s Oscar nominees – the second year in a row where almost all the major nominees were white.
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Boone Isaacs announced Friday that the academy will double the number of female and minority members by 2020 and will immediately diversify its leadership by adding three seats to its board of governors, to be filled in the coming weeks.
Its 51-member board of governors voted unanimously for the changes, which also include limiting members’ voting rights to 10 years and expanding recruitment outreach globally.
The organisation says that from next year, a new member’s voting status for the annual Academy Awards will last 10 years – but will only be renewed only if that new member has been active in filmmaking during that period.
Meanwhile, lifetime voting rights will only be extended to Academy members who have qualified for renewal for three consecutive terms.
The Academy’s Board has approved substantive changes created to make its membership, governing bodies, and voting members significantly more diverse.
The announcement came amid a backlash over the absence of actors or filmmakers of color in this year’s Oscars nominations, prompting actor Will Smith, director Spike Lee and a handful of others to say they plan to shun the Oscars ceremony on February 28. “And I think that we have”, she said. “We need to do more, and better and more quickly”.
“As things got a little provocative and exciting, he said, ‘I’m throwing out the show I wrote and writing a new show, ‘” Hudlin told ET.
What the board did not do was change any of its voting processes, such as raising the number of best picture nominees to 10 or eliminating its complex preferential ballot system, which some speculated might have hurt “Straight Outta Compton”, a popular, critically acclaimed film on the hip-hop group N.W.A that failed to secure a best picture nomination. This will increase diversity on the board “where key decisions about membership and governance are made”, according to the release. The current members will also have their memberships reviewed and renewed after being analysed according to new standards. “One good step in a long, complicated journey for people of color + women artists”.
But when last week’s all-white acting nominees were announced, Boone Isaacs and her academy colleagues realized it was not enough.
Over the course of the week since the nominations, various performers have weighed in on the debate, including Viola Davis, who said the problem is not with the Academy, but the studios that make decisions about which films to make.
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April Reign, an African-American activist who started the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag a year ago, welcomed the changes but was still calling on viewers to boycott the Oscars. The criticism is that [the academy] is just a bunch of old white guys – and that’s fair – and how are we going to remedy that?
