Only for Awards qualification. And they’re trying to reflect the world we live in. Sort of clumsily, but that’s the overall point they’re going for.
Which brings us full circle.
Is the Academy there to promote the art of film making or promote social justice?
Is that true, though? Take the movies that got nominated for Best Picture over the last ten or twenty or whatever years; how many of them already qualified, back when folks were asking nicely and waiting?
Both, it seems. I’m not sure they actually manage to do anything except waste four hours of our lives every February.
Ask the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag.
Uh, no? As far as I can tell, you can still qualify for Best Picture under these new guidelines even with an all-white cast reciting lines written by a white guy as directed by, y’know, a white guy.
I’m not sure if it’s quite that easy, but if you’re right, then what’s everyone complaining about?
The more I look at the “restrictions” and then consider past movies the more I am of the feeling most movies will meet the criteria.
I am beginning to think think this was very carefully crafted to look like it is doing something but not really.
As I consider movies that would fail I came up with a good one (12 Angry Men) but as I considered others a lot of movies came to mind but almost none crossed the line.
Kinda thinking this is so much bullshit. It’s more virtue signalling than substance.
Actually lots of different races in crews in the Age of Sail. The Napoleonic Wars are the same time period as the War of 1812 (where the book version was actually set). At least 15% of US navy enlisted were Black then. And in that same war, the British accepted American Blacks into their navy. And that’s not mentioning the lascars. So no, minorities on a ship’s crew would not be rare at all.
Didn’t one of the jurors in Twelve Angry Men say that he grew up in a very similar environment to the defendant? That doesn’t explicitly mean that he’s in the same ethnic group as him, but it certainly makes it likely.
But OK, the Peter Fonda version didn’t have any nonwhite or nonmale cast members. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t qualify. Remember, there are four standards, and you only need to meet two.
That’s exactly the business they’re in. The whole point of the Academy Awards is deciding which movies have what they need to be considered for awards.
No they are not.
I think you are confusing artistic standards with artistic content.
They already made a racially diverse 12 Angry Men film, and it was quite well-received.
I do think we’re going to see a lot of gay best friends in movies that are otherwise White sausage fests.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is in whatever business they want to be in. If you aren’t a member you have no say in the matter. Whatever business they are in, they have never been in the business of putting artistic standards and content above all else.
…you keep talking about “the art.”
But who is the artist you are talking about here?
Are you talking about the Director?
In the entire history of the Oscars only five women have been nominated for best Director. Only one women has ever won. We are talking about over 400 nominees. Only 5 of them have been women.
If it was only ever about the art then how did this discrepancy come to happen? In 2019 all the nominees were men. In 2018 all the nominees were men. Greta Gerwig got nominated in 2017. Then all men in 2016 then all men in 2015 and then all men in 2014 and I think you get the picture right now.
50% of film school graduate are women. But the state of the pipeline makes zero difference to the industry.
So are men just better artists than women? Does that explain why men dominate the directors category over women?
Or perhaps something else is going on. Lets look at a couple of directors, the Russo Brothers. They credit the mentoring of Steven Soderbergh for their success. And Soderbergh’s influence lead them to fund a production company that aimed to “shepherd emerging indie talents and their projects to fruition.” And the talent in their stable? Morten Tyldum. Andy Muschietti. The Daniels. Matt Carnahan. Sam Hargrave.
Hollywood has never been about giving work to “the best artists.” Its an industry where the gatekeepers give work to people who look and sound like them. Colin Trevorrow famously got shoulder-tapped by Steven Spielberg to make Jurassic World after only a single indie film. (And by indie, we are talking about a budget of $750,000 dollars here. Even the smallest of movies cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make.) They then gave him a Star Wars movie. (That they then had to take away from him when it became apparent that he really isn’t that great of a writer/director. (To see why, if you have time watch this video-critique of Trevorrow’s passion project, “The Book of Henry” by Foldable Human.)
How did “artists” like Bryan Singer keep getting directing gigs in Hollywood with such a big history of accusations of sexual assault and walking off set? Why did Catherine Hardwicke get put into “Directors Jail” after directing a movie that made 400 million dollars worldwide? Because Hollywood has never really been about the art.
The great thing here is the two work hand-in-hand. Because when nearly all the “art” is written by white men, directed by white men, financed and produced by white men, starring white men, then everything coming out of Hollywood looks and sounds exactly the same. Promoting “social justice” leads to a diversity of voices, a diversity of artistic vision, and ultimately will lead to bigger box offices. It should come as no surprise that movies like Black Panther and Captain Marvel made billions at the box office. And when you look at the next slate of Marvel films with Cate Shortland directing Black Widow, Chloe Zhao directing Eternals, Destin Daniel Cretton directing Shang-Chi and Taiki Watiti directing Thor, at least one studio seems to have gotten the message.
But the reality is that this is the exception, not the rule. Very little has changed. And “Hollywood” have been pretty clear that they don’t really want things to change. Because (just like in the rest of society) if you’ve got the power and control, why would you want to give it up? The new Oscar rules don’t really change much, and film critics I follow seem to all agree that most Oscar winners would have fit the criteria anyway. But its telling how instantly people like you pushed back on this really small initiative, and how long it took you to actually realize that there really isn’t that much “substance” to it. If this rather mild change to the Oscar rules provokes this sort of reaction, real lasting, substantive change will be an even harder thing to make happen.
Another nail in the coffin that finally buries any relevancy the Oscars had (i.e. very little)
“Best Film” will now, even more, mean something other that “Best Film”.
It’ll also now mean “Best Film that conforms to some arbitrary identitarian criteria that we made up to make ourselves look good and allow ourselves to pat ourselves on the back”
Having a diverse cast or production team or a “worthy” story is of no relevance to artistic merit. It is a stupid idea but not an unexpected one and not one that’ll help their credibility.
As has been pointed out, many crews were recruited from around the world, and would have included a very diverse crew. Take Moby Dick, in which the harpooneers were a Pacific Islander, an African, and a Native American, and there were other minorities on the crew.
Also, although it was rarely made explicit in former decades, the crew would also undoubtedly include LGBTQ individuals (at least situationally).
But there are 4 Standards, only 2 of which must be met. Don’t overlooking the other 3 Standards. All the movie needs are minority interns, female hairstylists, makeup artists, other crew, more female/minority executives, etc.
The running in the LA area for two weeks is asking both too much and too little. If I cared about their little ritual they put on for themselves, I’d think that a better criterion would be a broader exposure than simply 2 weeks in the LA area, but not necessarily in the LA area. This might actually make the awards relevant for more people because sometimes people hear about a movie that qualifies due to satisfying the bare minimum and think “premise sounds interesting! Never played around here.” Maybe a minimum of showings in America.
^A Simple Truth.
Also: despite it having been mentioned several times that Standard 1 (about the actors) need NOT be met, some are still arguing about how terrible Standard 1 is and that adhering to Standard 1 is anti-art and so on.
Again, filmmakers can make a movie with All Straight White Males onscreen, and still win Best Picture.
All they have to do is meet two of the other three standards. They can completely ignore Standard 1 and still win the Oscar. So I’m not seeing any limitations, there, on anyone’s artistic impulses.