Spike Lee lauds academy changes, still plans to skip Oscars

22, following a weeklong storm of criticism and calls for an Oscar boycott after academy members nominated an all-white slate of actors for the second year in a row. As part of the plan, the Academy promises to double its number of women and minority members by 2020.

The Academy has also decided that three new seat will be added to the 51 Board of Governors.

President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first African-American to lead the organization, made the announcement after critics had hit the academy since it released the list of nominees a week earlier. The session ended with a unanimous vote to endorse the new processes, but action on possible changes to Oscar balloting was deferred for later consideration.

On Friday, the Academy announced lifetime voting statuses for members will last 10 years and will only be renewed if the members are active in films during that decade.

In addition, members will receive lifetime voting rights after three 10-year terms or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award. “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”.

A 2012 Los Angeles Times study found that the academy was 94 percent white and 77 percent male.

There is historical precedent for Boone Isaac’s efforts to change the academy’s membership.

“Shame is a helluva motivator”, she continued.

Boone Isaacs, though, hopes changes at the academy will spread through the Hollywood community and into studios’ executive offices.

“As things got a little provocative and exciting, he said, ‘I’m throwing out the show I wrote and writing a new show, ‘” Hudlin told ET. The Academy will apply these same standards retroactively to current members.

What the board did not do was change any of its voting processes, such as raising the number of best picture nominees to 10 or eliminating its complex preferential ballot system, which some speculated might have hurt “Straight Outta Compton”, a popular, critically acclaimed film on the hip-hop group N.W.A that failed to secure a best picture nomination. As such, anyone who hasn’t been involved in the film industry for a decade could have their voting status revoked.

A member of the documentary branch posted a bitingly sarcastic statement to Facebook: “The Motion Picture Academy, in the spirit of Affirmative Action (which has worked so well in our universities), is determined to take the Oscar vote away from the Old White Guys (including mine, possibly)”.

Therefore after the meeting, Academyissued a statement on revealing the new rules for membership and its steps to include more members of different races and gender.

Despite widespread speculation that the Academy could also make changes in some of the rules regarding the voting for best picture and other Oscar categories, the Academy did not today announce any changes in how it goes about choosing victor of its annual awards.

On Monday, writer/director Spike Lee, who received an honorary Oscar in November, blasted the Academy for the lack of black nominees over the past two years. “They have earned the privilege of being in the Academy through their work and just because they’re no longer active doesn’t mean that they can’t be a good judge of what they’re looking at”. Their memberships will be reviewed according to their activity status. So if you got an Oscar in the ’70s and you never worked again, you’ll still be in the Academy.