New-look Oscars thanks to ‘less white’ Academy

THE director of the movie Moonlight is sure his film would not have scored eight Oscar nominations before the Academy moved to become “less white”.

The film, which follows a young black man struggling with his sexuality in a deprived neighbourhood of Miami, has received nods including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor.

However, Barry Jenkins said he is not sure the film would have been so successful if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which votes for the Oscars, had not expanded its voting body to include more young people and minorities after #Oscarssowhite.

“The movie would be the movie and made the same way, but would a different body have ended up with the same result?” said Jenkins.

“I think in years past, if someone had said ‘I have this movie that is about a poor black boy growing up in the projects with a mom addicted to drugs and who is struggling with his sexuality’, maybe it would have been easier for someone to say, ‘I don’t need to watch that’. But because of the uproar last year, I do think people informally decided ‘I’m not going to assume I know what this is and I’m going to watch it’, and once you get past that, it is just a work of art.

“I wish we could take these films and take them back in time a year and see what happened then, but we can’t. It would be interesting,” he said.

Jenkins is the first black director to be nominated for a screenplay prize in a best picture-nominated film. If he wins the best director Oscar he would be the first black filmmaker to do so, but says he is not letting it affect him.