So who is going to keep track of all this? Will the studios have to present a report to the academy with the ethnicity/sexuality breakdown of the cast and crew for each picture they submit? Will it be someone's job to keep track of the hiring and tell the producers they need to hire more of this or that to qualify? Will they have to measure how long each person appears on screen to qualify? Or will it be number of lines or words? I still don't see how they can legally have people they hire tell them their ethnic breakdown and sexuality.

My thoughts too. This seems to me like the Academy wants to make it appear like they're doing something noble to enact change when really they're not doing anything besides generating a lot of paperwork.

How will multiple hats work? For example, will a typical Spike Lee film get credit for having a black writer, black director and a black producer, even though it's just him doing all of that?

I agree that this will not be difficult to meet, especially when producer is one of those things that can have multiple people getting credit. I wonder how strictly they will look into producer credits being handed out to people who had little to do with the film.

So it's not about ability or excellence, it's about meeting quotas?

That's wrong.

If the best cinematographer for the job is a white guy, and the editor the director wants to use is a white guy, and the producer is a white guy, they're out of the running regardless of how good the movie is?

That's pathetic.

It's about excellence along with meeting extra guidelines if you want Best Picture consideration..

I was curious about that, too. That's why I didn't use many producer examples. Plus, do you get full credit for a female or minority producer when it's one out of eight? Likewise for things like screenwriter. If there are four credited writers and only one is a woman, how does that count?

And along the lines of your Spike Lee example, auteur directors like the Coen brothers or Steven Soderbergh have fewer available slots by handling so much on their own.

It was an interesting exercise looking into those films that were mentioned in that last article, though. I just used IMDB and didn't look too deep and only included ones that were obvious who was in charge.

Plenty of other positions are available to meet these requirements.

But it’s also pretty telling if you are only picking from a pool of straight white dudes for these positions.

Two things.

First, if you can get Roger Deakins to shoot your film, you probably have Roger Deakins shoot your film. Sure, Rodrigo Prieto is no slouch, but Deakins is the one DP who 'above the credits' actors will work with just because he's the DP.

Also, there needs to be a separate category for Soderbergh, who shoots and edits everything himself. Except, does it count that as film editor he's credited as being female since he does it under the name Mary Ann Bernard?

This alone shows the absurdity of the whole thing. G-d knows I'm as big an advocate for diversity and inclusion as anyone, and I realize this is all a response to the #OscarsSoWhite movement, AND there's certainly been an 'old boys' network in Hollywood since, well, forever, but this is the cludgiest way of dealing with this problem imaginable. You know how Hollywood could actually do something? Stop nominating boring English period dramas, and look at cinema like, I dunno - Support the Girls, The Last Black Man In San Francisco, or - and I realize I'm beating this drum too much - Booksmart, which were three of the best, most interesting, and most entertaining examples of American cinema from the last half-decade.

The Academy Awards are supposed to recognize excellence. Period.

Not excellence with inclusion and diversity, just excellence.

So under the new rules it's possible to make the best movie in decades and not even get nominated.

That's crazy. It's stupid. It's absurd.

Inclusion is good, but these new rules change the purpose of the Academy. Instead of recognizing and rewarding excellence, it is now about pushing diversity. That is a huge shift in the mission of the Academy. Hell, it's a new mission altogether! The old mission has been abandoned in favor of the new one.

Ridiculous.

It's interesting that you think those can be separated so cleanly from each other.

Also, considering this is the Academy itself deciding this change, maybe you're wrong about what the Academy Awards actually represent? Is there something wrong about recognizing excellence and inclusion and diversity?

That's always been possible. The Academy doesn't have to meet your standards of excellence or mine. They just have to do what gets them the most ratings. That's it.

You can (easily) have excellence without diversity.

You can also (easily) have diversity without excellence.

The Academy was founded to recognize excellence and support the art of filmmaking, as well as supporting and recognizing the artists who make those films.

This rule change is not about art. It is about politics. And that makes it a serious change in the mission of the Academy.

OK, and???

I've never seen Crash and know nothing about it.

It's generally considered one of the worst Best Picture winners over the last couple of decades, and the consensus is that it won because it was a politically correct movie about race relations that, by voting for it, it made members of AMPAS feel all 'woke' and shit (before 'woke' was a term.)

The point being, this new rule isn't anything new, it's just a codification of the same lame bullshit the Academy has been doing for years.

Ahh. Ok.

I still see this as a significant change since excellent movies could be excluded by the new official rules, and that wouldn't have been possible before.

​​​​​​The Academy has just gone too far this time.

No, it was founded as a PR mechanism, and to hopefully squash unions from forming:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...-oscar-history
The Awards are just major studios patting themselves on the back.

BWAHAHA! You're incredibly naive or disingenuous to suggest politics have never affected the MPAA before. I mean, these rules are just an expansion of things they've already been doing, like this 2018 initiative:
https://www.oscars.org/news/academy-...les-and-london

The Academy Awards are a commercial for the movie industry. I think they're fun, and I love watching the show every year, but they're not definitive rulings on who gave the best performance or which sound mixing was superior to the sound editing.

This is reminding me of the controversy last year about the Academy saying Netflix films wouldn't be eligible for Oscars unless they had theatrical screenings. They're not interested in promoting Netflix, they want to promote their own product.

The idea the Oscars are about "art" over "politics" is laughable.

The rules don't go into effect until 2024. They're not going to affect any film that was in production before these new rules were announced. If someone makes a film that doesn't comply with the rules, they're consciously excluding themselves.

They should be able to hire people solely based on talent and ability, not meeting quotas.

Diversity and inclusion "should" happen without people having to push for it too, but we don't live in an ideal world. Do you think productions that are all straight-cis-white-male somehow reflect a "natural" state of affairs, instead of a reflection of systemic discrimination over the course of decades?

People are still free to hire whomever they want for a particular film production, and the Academy is free to consider certain films not worthy of consideration for Best Picture based on whatever criteria the Academy sees fit.

It reminds me of when some folks would say things like, "well, why isn't Movie X in the Criterion Collection? It deserves to be there!" and it's like... start your own label/awards, then. As I noted earlier in this thread, I want to know what filmmakers and current Academy members think of this. Not necessarily individually, but also as a whole. This really seems like the kind of thing that's not nearly as big of an issue as some want to make it out to be. "What about The Irishman?" Yeah, it'd still qualify. "But what about QUALITY??" Uhh, Crash? Green Book? "I know nothing about those!"

Come on, now.

If The Irishman was Directed by a No Name Director no way would it have been nominated for BP or BD. Part of the legacy advantage big name(mostly white male) director's have is they are almost treated like incumbent politicians and a nomination is something they have to fail out of instead of the awards existing like an Open Seat Race where all eligable nominees start out on an even playing field.

To me, the Academy lost all credibility in the late 90s when the Weinstein’s began to openly campaign and essentially buy the award. I still watch them for fun and root for my choices to win but it isn’t some barometer of quality that they claim it is.