Black Lives Matter effect? The Academy of Cinematographic Arts, which awards the Cinema Oscars each year, has decided to impose binding inclusion criteria for the awards ceremony. Tuesday, September 8, the predominant body of Hollywood cinema presented the conditions which will prevail from 2024 to the selection of those nominated for the supreme award: that of the best film.
Applicants must certify that they have made efforts to achieve diversity in the cast of actors and actresses. Otherwise, they will be able to show that their technical, production or marketing teams have a certain proportion of members from minorities. Or prove that they have recruited paid interns from these groups traditionally absent from decoration discounts. The Academy intends to encourage “Fair representation on and off screen in order to more accurately reflect the diversity of the audience”, she said in a press release.
A sign of the pressure to which it is subjected, at a time of national re-examination of the place left to blacks in society, the Academy presents in great detail what it means by diversity in the work that is candidate for the Oscar. The main role or “At least 30%” supporting roles are played by actors from a minority group, from the point of view of ethnicity or sexual orientation. Unless the plot itself focuses on an under-represented group.
Protest against “white” hegemony
Four years after the protest movement against “white” hegemony in American cinema, symbolized by the hashtag #Oscarsowhite (Oscars so white) and the boycott of the ceremonies by several celebrities, the emphasis on minorities is testament to the efforts of transformation of the Academy. In three years, it has doubled the number of its members – the professionals who nominate the winners – from minorities. This was the commitment made in 2016 by the president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, after a vintage that had seen a total absence of blacks among the twenty nominees.
Diversity is an old struggle in Hollywood. In 1988, Eddy Murphy noted in awarding the Oscar for best film that only three African-Americans had been distinguished in sixty years: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier and Louis (Lou) Gossett. Thirty years later, Frances McDormand, receiving the award for best actress for 3 Billboards. The panels of vengeance (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2018), by Martin McDonagh, called on “appointed” women to stand up and urge them to demand more openness. The new measures will only be applicable in 2024, for the 96e Academy Awards. For now, Hollywood is focused on organizing the 93e ceremony, in danger due to the pandemic. This, which was to be held at the end of February, has been postponed to April 25, 2021.
