Film academy president: ‘We need to step this up’

The actions announced Friday by academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs following a unanimous vote by the academy’s 51-member Board of Governors were by some measure an uncommonly quick reaction to the crisis that had enveloped the Academy Awards since nominations were announced eight days earlier.

The Academy will also take immediate action to increase diversity by adding new members who are not Governors to its executive and board committees where key decisions about membership and governance are made.

“It’s the right thing to do”, academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs said in an interview Friday.

The following day, the organization released a statement saying the Academy had “approved a sweeping series of substantive changes created to make the Academy’s membership, its governing bodies, and its voting members significantly more diverse”.

Members will only be able to keep their voting status for 10 years, rather than forever, and they can renew their voting status if they’ve been active in the Academy. Lifetime voting rights will be granted only to Academy Award nominees and winners, and to members after three ten-year voting terms.

The awards ceremony, also known as the Oscars, is considered the most prestigious film recognition in America.

According to the Academy, the Board of Governors voted Thursday night to begin “an ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”.

He said: “It was shameful and embarrassing that there were two years in a row without a single actor of colour nominated”.

The announcement came amid widespread dismay over a second straight year of all-white acting nominees, a development that has turned this year’s awards into a referendum on diversity in the movie industry. “I commend the Academy for what they’ve done”. Director Spike Lee and actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith said they would not attend the Oscar telecast on February 28, and activists called for a boycott of the show. “We need to do more, and better and more quickly”.

“People think that the Oscars so White is like the new Black Lives Matter thing”. Throughout the Academy’s 88-year history, it has consistently failed to acknowledge and reward those outside the white, male-dominated Hollywood establishment.

Warner Bros, one of Hollywood’s major studios, issued a statement within hours embracing the Oscar announcement, and Kevin Tsujihara, chairman of the Time Warner Inc-owned (TWX.N) studio, added, “there is more we must and will do”.

“One good step in a long, complicated journey for people of color + women artists”, she wrote on Twitter in a message attached to an official letter sent to her from members of the Academy.

The civil rights coalition promised that it would be ready to “present a clear and specific blueprint for moving forward” on accountability in the Academy and the film industry.