How The Academy is Dealing with #OscarsSoWhite by Increasing Its Non-White and Female Membership

Idris Elba John Boyega and Michael B Jordan have all been offered membership.

Image via BBC / Gage Skidmore

Early this year, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag spread through social media, racking up column inches and think pieces left and right. If your memory is hazy, basically what happened was that when the Oscar nominees were announced, people were quick to notice that all 20 nominees for the acting categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor & Best Supporting Actress) were white — for the second year in a row. There were plenty of high-profile performances by black actors in 2015, in films like Straight Outta Compton, The Hateful Eight, Concussion, Creed and Beasts of No Nation. Of course, not every film or actor can win, but it certainly did not look good that for two years in a row no non-white actors were even nominated. Journalist April Reign started the hashtag, and soon actors and filmmakers like Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Will Smith announced they were going to boycott the ceremony. 

So now the dust has settled, and now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (ie the people who give out the Oscars) are actually doing something about it. In a piece for The Guardian setting out ten ways to improve the situation, April Reigns said one key thing they could do is diversify the Academy’s membership. Their members are currently 75% white and 92% male — not really the target audience for Straight Outta Compton, tbh. But Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs (herself African American) promised to address that balance, and make the make-up of the Academy better reflect the wider population. She told Variety:

Every step we take, we are stepping toward the goal of normalization — I love that word. This is a continuum. The goal is the normalization in having artists and films rep society as a whole. Each year we take steps, and sometimes the steps are smaller, but we are committed to continue with that goal

Every year the Academy offers invites to new members, and this year they are reaching out to a record 683 new inductees. And more importantly, they are not all old white men. 46% of the invitees are female, and 41% are people of colour. The list includes some high profile names that missed on out nominations at this years awards as well, such as Idris Elba and Michael B Jordan.

Notable non-white names on the list include:

  • Idris Elba
  • John Boyega
  • Michael B Jordan
  • Mary J. Blige
  • Will.i.am 
  • Cary Fukunaga, director of Beasts of No Nation and True Detective
  • Nate Parker, director of the upcoming Birth of a Nation 
  • Ryan Coogler, director of Creed  and Black Panther
  • Blaxploitation pioneer Melvin Van Peebles
  • Carlito’s Way’s Luis Guzmán
  • 24 and Dear White People actor Dennis Haysbert
  • Korean star Byung-Hun Lee
  • Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto
  • Creed and Dear White People’s Tessa Thompson 

Other high-profile actress offered membership include Best Actress winner Brie Larson, Best Supporting Actress Alicia Vikander, and Emma Watson. You can read the whole list over on Variety.

Will this help? Well, it won’t change things overnight. First of all, they have only been invited at this point, so not all of them will necessarily accept (but why wouldn’t they? It means they get sent loads of DVD screeners of new films). And even if they all do accept, the Academy already has 6,261 voting members, so this won’t make that much of a dent — even with all these new additions, will only improve things very slightly, making it now 73% male and 89% white. 

Still, it’s a definite step in the right direction. And not just in terms of representation. There’s a lot of young, exciting talent being added. The Academy is notorious for having lots of old members who don’t really keep up with movies any more. That’s why bland, conservative movies tend to do so well. Hopefully this will shake things up — you’d have to think that Michael B Jordan and Ryan Coogler have more exciting taste than some 90 year old cinematographer. 

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