Weinstein ousted from Academy
Hollywood’s de facto governing body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, voted overwhelmingly Saturday to “immediately expel” Harvey Weinstein, breaking with 90 years of precedent and turning one of the biggest Oscar players in history into a hall-of-fame pariah.
The academy’s 54member board of governors made the decision at an emergency session after investigations by the New York Times and the New Yorker that revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against him going back decades.
In a statement, the academy said the vote was “well in excess of the required two-thirds majority.”
It added, “We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over. What’s at issue here is a deeply troubling problem that has no place in our society.”
Weinstein, who was fired by the movie and television studio he cofounded, the Weinstein Co., has denied rape allegations while acknowledging that his behavior “caused a lot of pain.”
Although largely symbolic, the ouster of Weinstein from the roughly 8,400-member academy is stunning because the organization is not known to have taken such action before — not when Roman Polanski, a member, pleaded guilty in a sex crime case involving a 13-year-old girl; not when women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby, a member, of sexual assault; and not when Mel Gibson went on antiSemitic tirade during a drunken driving arrest in 2006 or pleaded no contest to a charge of battery against an old girlfriend in 2011.
Before Weinstein — who built two studios on the back of the Academy Awards, securing more than 300 nominations for his movies — only one person was known to have been permanently expelled from the academy. Carmine Caridi, a character actor, had his membership revoked in 2004 for violating an academy rule involving Oscar voting. He got caught lending DVD screeners of contending films; copies ended up online.
The academy’s board, roughly 40 percent female, includes Hollywood titans like Steven Spielberg, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy, Tom Hanks, documentarian Rory Kennedy and Jim Gianopulos, chairman of Paramount Pictures.
In an example of Weinstein’s reach, at least 10 governors have worked on films that he produced or that his studios have released.
No person has been more closely associated with the Academy Awards in recent decades than Weinstein, who won a best picture Oscar in 1999 for “Shakespeare in Love” and who orchestrated campaigns that resulted in more than 80 statuettes for films released by the studios he ran, including five best picture Oscars for “Shakespeare in Love,” “The English Patient,” “Chicago,” “The King’s Speech” and “The Artist.”