Spike Lee praises Academy membership changes but still won’t attend the Oscars

In the midst of the controversy, the Academy’s president Cheryl Boone Isaacs made a statement on the organization’s twitter account.

She added: “These new measures regarding governance and voting will have an immediate impact and begin the process of significantly changing our membership composition”.

“Even if you fill the Academy with black and Latino and Asian members, if there’s no one on the screen to vote for, you’re not going to get the outcome that you want”.

Meanwhile, lifetime voting rights will only be extended to Academy members who have qualified for renewal for three consecutive terms.

Those losing eligibility to vote would be moved from active to “emeritus” status, absolving them of paying dues while leaving their academy privileges intact, except for voting.

The academy says it’s also actively recruiting new members global.

“My wife and I will be in my courtside seats”, he said.

The Los Angeles Times published, in 2012, a study which concluded that academy voters are markedly less diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithic than many in the film industry may suspect. The actor said there was “no joke that [Rock] can crack” that would make up for the Academy’s failure to nominate a single non-white acting nominee. “So until the product that’s being spit out is created at a point where there is more diversity, I don’t know that these changes will substantively affect much”.

An Oscar statue is seen during the nominations announcements for the 88th Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, California on January 14, 2016.

New roles will also be made in the Academy. To help Hollywood along in its struggle for inclusion, the National Urban League, the National Action Network and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation announced they’ve requested a meeting with the academy and film industry leaders.

“That’s insane”, said the four-time Oscar nominee. 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. We need to get out there with what we’ve been talking about internally, but now we have to put it into action.

The Academy committed to doubling the number of women and minorities among its 6,300 members, who are now 90 per cent white and 70 per cent male with an average age in the sixties.

So, I did the arithmetic, and this is what the Academy’s big diversity pledge is going to look like going forward, if the organization makes good on it’s promise: Next year, expect 3,006 voting women in the Academy.