Amid Oscars Criticism, Academy Aims to Double Women and Diverse Members

Meanwhile, the Academy will launch “an ambitious, global campaign” to recruit new members, while at the same time, maintaining its traditional process of having current members sponsor new ones.

Under new eligibility rules, each new member’s voting status will lapse after 10 years unless he or she has been active in motion pictures during that decade, and lifetime voting rights will only be conferred after three 10-year terms or if the member has won or been nominated for an Oscar. Rather, the Academy membership votes for who they feel needs to be nominated.

The organization also aims to add three new seats to its board, which now sits 51 members in total.

Oscars head Boone Isaacs said the new measures announced on Friday would “begin the process of significantly changing our membership composition”. Some other activists had urged Rock to withdraw; he never addressed those directly, but insiders said he believes he can do more good by remaining, since the Academy Awards reach a worldwide audience. In order to maintain an active voting body, the Academy is mandating “activ[ity] in motion pictures” over the course of an initial decade-long membership.

MARTIN: This is not just about the Oscar nominations this year.

“If the academy is going to double that number, that’s a huge leap up”, said O’Neil.

KEEGAN: Well, the Academy has, for the last few years, been pushing for more diversity among the new members it invites.

“There is a regressive slide towards separatism, towards racial and religious disharmony and that’s not the Hollywood that I want to leave behind”, he said.

The Mexican filmmaker, director of last year’s best film Oscar victor “Birdman” and this year’s nominee “The Revenant”, and others on the panel agreed producers need to do more at the start of a film’s development, in casting for instance, to achieve more cultural balance in film.

Limiting the terms of inactive or retired members means they will be replaced by new, diverse voters.

The academy board, which Boone Isaacs said had been planning some of the changes for months, approved the measures at a meeting held at the academy’s Beverly Hills offices. Jada Pinkett Smith, Spike Lee and Will Smith said they will not attend. “I do believe that the Academy made a good move yesterday in trying to diversify the ranks in the Academy”.

Currently, Isaacs is the only African-American on the board of governors which is predominantly white. None of the nominees for acting and directing awards were people of color despite a plethora of worthy candidates, an astonishing whitewash, and the Academy’s failure to adequately recognize non-white talent extended to the Oscars’ technical categories.

Actor Don Cheadle added of the boycott, “This is dealing with the symptom, not starting at the root cause of how we even get to results like this, which has to do with inclusion and access and the ability for people of color, women, minorities to get an entry level position where you can become someone who can green-light a movie”. So, at least he’s going for the right reasons. I appreciate the fact that the vote was unanimous, which indicates to me that the academy is serious about making the organization more inclusive and more diverse.