Academy Awards changes its rules to increase diversity in Hollywood

As part of the new push to expand gender and racial diversity, the academy said it will add three new seats to its 51-member governing board reserved for women and minorities.

“I am encouraged that, under the bold leadership of President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is taking important steps to ensure that its voting membership better reflects the range of experiences and perspectives that make cinema such a powerful and indispensable art form”. On Friday, the Academy announced big changes to who gets to vote as well as a new initiative to ensure that the Academy doubles the number of women and minority members by the year 2020. Beginning later this year, each new member’s voting status will last 10 years, and will be renewed if the new member has been active in film during that decade.

Matt Damon, who is in the Oscars race for his role in “The Martian”, has joined other Hollywood celebrities in criticising the Academy awards’ lack of inclusion at this year’s nominations. These changes will make it harder for members who have retired from the business – or those who have not won an Oscar themselves – to retain their voting status. “We’ve been a more than a predominantly white institution for a long time”. And it will limit members’ lifetime membership privileges to bring in new blood.

The move came after a number of high-profile filmmakers and actors criticized the Academy for only nominating white actors and actresses – for the second year in a row. We will apply these same standards retroactively to current members. “One good step in a long, complicated journey for people of color + women artists”, she wrote on Twitter.

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Tom O’Neil, founder of awards prediction site goldderby.com, told AFP it was a “dramatic first step” but urged caution on the numbers.

Oscar nominee Matt Damon also praised the initiatives, but added the industry had “a long, long, long way to go”.

Spike Lee also expressed qualified support for the new measures, describing them as “a start”. “I do believe that the Academy made a good move yesterday in trying to diversify the ranks in the Academy”.

Boone Isaacs – who is black and was once the only person of color on the academy’s board of governors – said Sunday that “the change is not coming as fast as we would like” and that “we need to do more, and better and more quickly”. By the way, there are exceptions for people who were nominated for an Oscar or who got an Oscar. Academy honchos opted not to wait for the regularly scheduled board meeting on January 26. “The infrastructure is the problem”, said Mr Felix Sanchez, chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts.

Not only are the nominees exclusively caucasian but a trend in those who attend the Oscars on February 28 might be primarily white as well.

Ken Howard, president of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing about 160,000 actors and other performers, called the changes “well intended, and I think it should be acceptable to people”.