All of them will go the B2 route.

In general, this mostly seems like a disadvantage for indie movies that have smaller casts/crews, while bigger productions will have no problem hitting the quotas.

That is a good point.

I wonder how many young white men who are hoping to break into the film industry will suddenly “remember “ that experimental phase they went through in High School or College when they explored their own sexuality.

I was sort of thinking along similar lines. Aren't you basically potentially outing people? And how exactly do you prove LGBTQ status, especially the Q? Can all participants just say they're questioning? That just seems so silly. Actually, this all seems silly.

Would have preferred if the link with the news posted came from a site without an axe to grind or a certain anti-diversity bias. Reading from other sites like VOX, who presented all the options, including the missing from the previous post C and D options, this won't be hard to do for many studios. Many of them have already been making changes for a while due to lack of diversity complaints. This is done for Best Picture only, so is not like it's going affect documentaries, short films, animation or foreign films. Option B will most likely be the one studios use to begin with because it won't affect the creativity of the story, which is the most important thing in a film.

I've seen already a lot of right-wingers criticize this move. People like Dean Cain, Kristy Alley and Kristy Swanson have been outspoken on Twitter about this. I don't know why they care that much since there's 0 chance that any of them get nominated. I mean, those faith films may be a hit with the Evangelical crowd, but they aren't winning any acting awards anytime sooon.

Everytime "Hollywood" tries to lecture the general public about being woke, I just remind myself that they kept quiet for decades about Harvey Weinstein.

We could say the same thing about all these politicians, including Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein. Or Penn State Athletics and Sandusky. Or all the sexual harassment cases at Fortune 500 companies. This type of shit happens all over the world and across different types of businesses and sectors. The thing is what is done after the shit is uncovered.

And in this case, you use a whataboutism to make a statement about something that has 0 to do with Weinstein.

Absurd.

So no more gangster movies can get nominated. Goodfellas? You aren't P.C. enough. No nomination for you under these rules.

This is liberalism gone way, way too far. Inclusion is great, but there are stories that do not call for the kind of inclusion that the new rules demand.

Again, Goodfellas, Godfather - fugeddaboutit. You don't qualify.

And that's why these rules aren't just a joke, they're oppressive and will actually hurt the artistic side of the business.

Something like The Irishman will have a harder time getting made now. Things like that will certainly be looked down on by the Academy elite.

This is flat out wrong on a bunch of levels.

on this forum? Surely you jest!

Anyway, reading the rules, it's pretty clear that these are not all tough barriers, and can easily be met by multi-million dollar companies. There does seem to be some additional leeway for smaller indie productions, too.

But here's a good excerpt from the Vox piece.
Seems like people complaining* are generally ill-informed about the facts of movie making and the breadth of opportunities available to meet just a handful of the requirements (which, again, are only relevant to the BP category, and only from 2023 onward, and which some smaller productions may be exempt from anyway).
​​​​​​
I don't want to say this whole thing is a non-issue, as I kind of understand the negativity, but I think we'll see that studios will have no problem actually doing the bare minimum here.

​​​​​​* Not necessarily people here. More so the typical Twitter and YouTube pundits with surface level hot takes on everything. I'm interested in what actual career filmmakers think on this.

How does this affect the Oscar chances of a film like PARASITE? Absolutely no one from that film, either in front of or behind the camera, comes from a group that is "underrepresented" in Korea.

The Academy Awards aren't from Korea. They are from the US, thus making Koreans a minority group as they are in this country.

I think it's "underrepresented" in films shown in North America/USA, not necessarily underrepresented in the country it was filmed in. Foreign language films have an uphill battle being nominated for and winning Best Picture as it is, so I doubt these rules are intended to exclude them.

Also, you still only need to meet 2 of the 4 categories, so all the additional representation could be behind the scenes, and I think category D would be specifically about the NA/US distribution and marketing.

Did you actually read all the options filmmakers and studios have to meet these quotas? Is not only about who's in front of the screen, but behind the scenes. So a movie like the Irishman or Goodfellas can still be made as long as Scorcese hires enough people to work on the production side that meet the quota established by the Academy Awards. Also, filmmakers and studios can decide not to meet the quota. The only repercussion to this is that they aren't going to be nominated for Best Picture. So if Universal Studios wants to make Jurassic Park meets King Kong and cast and hire every white person in America, they can. They simply won't qualify for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

The Oscars have been bleeding viewers for years now. This is going to turn off some of the viewers who have still been watching. The question is whether it will bring in more new viewers to compensate.

They need people to keep watching and that’s their primary concern. If no one cares about the Oscars anymore, studios won’t be motivated by the changes to be more diverse in productions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Hopefully for the better.

I agree that for big studio pictures it shouldn't be an issue at all. I do wonder if it affects smaller independent art house films from England, things like Atonement, Wings of a Dove, Room With a View, End of the Affair. They have smaller studios and a much smaller crew. Plus they are telling stories about a much "whiter" time and place. I don't want them to have to shoehorn diversity into a story where in reality there wasn't any. Then you get David Copperfield, 2020.

Speaking of the "foreign film" category, it has always been weird and seemingly impossible to do justly. It needs to be non-American? Then Commonwealth countries will dominate, mostly British. It needs to be in a non-English language? Sorry Ghana and any other country that tries to get broader commercial appeal.

Personally, I'm all for fewer period pieces being nominated in general, with or without new rules.

Actually, the message of diversity should apply to them too. Similar to the US, many of their productions are all white for no other reason than implicit racism. Just look at the reaction when someone even suggested that Idris Elba became the next James Bond. Or the racism Megan Markle faces on a constant basis. It would serve well if they start putting diverse people in the crew to start with.

Reminds me of Stripes...

"Are either of you homosexuals?"

"No, but we're willing to learn."

I know it was mentioned a few posts up, but it's kind of ironic this comes in the same calendar year the first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture.

Otherwise, whatever, I don't care. Covid notwithstanding I'll continue to go to the cinema, and I imagine a number of movies I see there will get nominations for Best Picture. I'm still pretty pissed that Booksmart wasn't one of them.

Hmm, after reading over the requirements, this looks to me like yet another thing that sounds good, but in reality will have little effect. Pretty sure the same movies to be nominated for Best Picture would still be getting nominated were it not for these new rules. I'll see how it plays out in a couple of years, but right now I don't see this preventing movies from being nominated for Best Picture that would have otherwise. The nominations don't come out of the blue. The studios know which of their pictures they're engineering Oscar campaigns for, and it looks very simple to meet the eligibility requirements.

I was more concerned about their proposed (and scrapped) plans for Best Popular Picture or whatever it was.

I keep thinking back to 20 years ago when if you looked at what airred btwn 1:am-4:am they were all WB/UPN black sitcom reruns to allow a network to meet it's diversity quoto without being actually more diverse. This new rule just means films without much diversity or behind the camera will just use loopholes to cover the fact. This will only really hurt say Eastern European films since they have a monolithically white population. Even then though if a Polish/Czech etc filmmaker is mainstream enough to be on the Oscar radar they would know how to exploit said loopholes.

Another follow up blog post from the same source that Red Hood didn’t like :


Indies Will Bear The Brunt

From “The Oscars’ New Diversity Rules Won’t Change Who Wins Best Picture,” by reason.com’s Kat Rosenfield: “On its own, the conflation of diversity with quality raises interesting questions; under these standards, the massive Fast & Furious franchise would be Oscar eligible, but Martin Scorcese’s entire library would struggle to make the cut.

“[The impact of the new Academy Standards] will be felt most by indie directors, who work on shoestring budgets, with limited resources and no guarantee of being picked up by a distributor with adequately diverse executive leadership. For them, it becomes a choice: sacrifice their shot at the industry’s highest honor (with all the career-boosting benefits an Oscar nomination entails), or conform.

“Some may shrug at that, or even see it as a net positive in a world where too many movies already exist about straight white dudes.

“On the other hand, the list of movies that would be shut out from Oscar contention under the ‘Representation’ standard is pretty, well, diverse. The Hurt Locker; Boyhood; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Birdman; The Lighthouse; 1917; Gladiator; Gone Girl: All would fail to make the cut.”

Seems odd the writer names movies that failed to make the Best Picture nomination cut all on their own without these rules.

I noticed that. But hey, they mentioned one movie that I threw out as a spur of the moment hypothetical as well.

I call BS on this latest article. I guess they're trying too hard to focus on category A. But Hurt Locker wouldn't qualify? Wouldn't it qualify under category A because of Anthony Mackie? And then with category B, you have a woman director, a Middle Eastern set decorator, and one of the two editors is a woman.

Then most of the others would qualify under category B. Birdman would easily qualify: Hispanic director, Hispanic and women producers, gay costume designer, woman casting director. O Brother would qualify with women as set decorator, casting directors, and costume design. 1917 has a female writer, casting director. Gone Girl has a female writer, art director. Lighthouse has female editor, casting director, costume designer.