I do not relish writing this post, but it is my job, as The Hollywood Reporter‘s awards columnist, to recognize and notify readers about the stories behind the stories that pertain to awards, even if doing so doesn’t endear me to everyone who might read them — so here we go.
On Wednesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released a list of the people it has invited to join its membership this year — a list containing a record-setting 774 names, a sizable portion of whom are women and people of color — and, in my assessment, it erred badly.
To understand why, we have to go back a few years. The Oscar nominations announced in 2015 and 2016 did not feature any people of color among the 20 acting nominees for either year, sparking outrage and a hashtag that quickly went viral: #OscarsSoWhite. The Academy staved off a boycott of the Oscars in 2016 by recommitting to a prior vow to double its 2015 percentages of women and people of color by 2020, and by suggesting that “inactive” members — a clear reference to the old white men who always had accounted for the lion’s share of the membership — would lose their voting privileges.
The latter move was largely abandoned as incumbent members expressed outrage at the implication that they were racist. But the former initiative was prioritized, since it would be far easier to dilute the influence of the old white male demographic than it would be to excommunicate them. To that end, the Academy, a year ago, flooded its organization with a then-record 683 new members — including, as with this year, unprecedented numbers of women and people of color, many of whose film-specific credentials quite frankly did not merit an invitation.
There are a number of problems with this approach.
1) It lends credence to the outside accusations that the Academy’s nominations in 2015 and 2016 were problematic in the first place. Optically, of course, they were, but, in reality, no woman or person of color had been robbed of a nomination that had been universally expected, and there were no inexplicable absences among the nominees.
The Academy’s leadership knew that its members — who had embraced films about and performances by people of color in the immediately previous years and who had elected governors who had, in turn, elected the Academy’s first black female president — were not racist in any significant numbers, any more than they were homophobic (a ridiculous excuse sometimes given for why Brokeback Mountain lost the best picture Oscar to Crash in 2006), but they pandered anyway.2) Markedly lowering the bar for entry into the Academy dilutes the credibility of the organization and the prestige of its awards.
3) When the 2017 set of nominations — the first after the diversity deluge — included numerous films about and performances by people of color, many people, including #OscarsSoWhite creator April Reign and apparently the Academy itself, saw that as confirmation that the Academy’s course of action, as far as invitations, had been necessary and was working. In fact, it is my firm belief that there was no cause-and-effect whatsoever, and that the same films and performances would have been nominated in either of the prior two years, since they were more the sort of…
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