Hold Your Applause for the Academy’s New Diversity Rules
In front of the camera and behind it, diversity in Hollywood productions has accelerated over the last decade. Diversity is a worthy and valuable goal in any venture. The wider your net of experiences, the closer you get to capturing truth. Redundant backgrounds mean a narrow perspective, garnering a narrow appeal for the end-product. Diversity just makes good business sense. From a cultural standpoint, it is important for everyone to see aspects of their own identity represented in positive ways. Hollywood is trending in the right direction, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is being dragged along by Hollywood’s efforts toward diversity while attempting to take credit for driving it.
As of 2024, contenders for the coveted Academy Award for “Best Picture” must meet two out of four new criteria. The criteria are meant to foster diversity by requiring productions to meet minimum standards for representation of underrepresented groups in terms of cast, crew, its industry training programs, and its associated marketing teams. The Academy defines underrepresented groups as “women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people or people with disabilities.” To meet the first set of criteria a movie must have either one lead/supporting character be representative of one of these groups or have 30% of its secondary roles represent at least two of the groups. Similar standards are set for the other categories. Academy President David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson said in a joint statement about the implementation of the new criteria, “The aperture must widen to reflect our diverse global population in both the creation of motion pictures and in the audiences who connect with them.” While this is all perfectly in line with the goals of diversity, when taken together, these criteria are not a prescription for what ought to happen but are merely a description of what is already the case. Given that only two categories must meet the standards, this sets the bar so low that it is unclear if any previous “Best Picture” winner would have been disqualified under these rules at all. If the Academy cannot demonstrate that these rules would have improved diversity in productions of the past, how can they reasonably expect them to positively influence the diversity of productions in the future?
It is much too easy for productions to follow the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit. The rules conflate women of any kind as being equally underrepresented as any of the other groups. Combine this with the fact that the director’s chair, a powerful position where diversity is arguably needed most, is equated with other department heads such as the casting director, costume designer, and hair & makeup leaders. According to statistics by Women in Hollywood, the latter positions are already 76–84% likely to be filled by a woman, though most likely a white woman, which means that same percentage of productions are already meeting one of the standards. Not only is there no incentive to put a woman in the director’s chair but the rule does nothing to encourage adding diversity from other underrepresented groups to the roles already dominated by white women. “As long as you tick two of the other boxes, you could still theoretically submit an all-white, all-male remake of ‘Birth of a Nation’ and qualify,” said Steve Rose in an op-ed for The Guardian.
The Academy is not pushing diversity so much as Hollywood is pulling it along. The #OscarsSoWhite debacle of 2016 saw all 20 acting award nominations given to white actors for the second year in a row. This was a year that featured Creed, a black-directed movie featuring two black leads, yet its only recognition by the Academy was to award Sylvester Stallone with “Best Supporting Actor”. The year prior, Selma, a movie about Martin Luther King Jr., was given a “Best Picture” nomination but its black director and cast of black actors went unrecognized as individuals. The Academy’s diversity rules appear to be a scolding of Hollywood for not engaging in diversity when the real picture is one of the Academy’s own failure to recognize the diversity that is already there.
Hollywood is far from perfecting proportional representation of its audiences, but the fact is, as late as 2012, the voting membership of the Academy was a staggering 94% white and 77% male, according to the LA Times. A decree regarding diversity from a group with these demographics elicits a similar feeling to hearing that the Pope has come around on same-sex marriage a decade and a half after Canada has legalized it. How can one consider themselves a moral authority when they are that far behind the curve on the subject they claim to govern? It is for this reason that we must stop viewing the Academy as an authority on diversity and reject their biased interpretations of quality in film. If the Academy wants to recover from its tainted image, the only diversity rules it should be implementing are ones pertaining to its own membership.
