No./15 Why the new Oscar rules don’t do the job
New standards will change the way films are nominated for Best Picture. But as activist April Reign argues, it’s too little, too late
THE OSCARS ARE changing. Last month, the Academy announced that there would be new inclusion standards for the Best Picture category from 2024 onwards, with each film required to meet at least two of four new standards, including on-screen rules (such as featuring a major character from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group) and off-screen rules (two or more department heads be female, LGBTQ, disabled or part of an underrepresented group, for example). It’s the latest attempt to improve diversity in the awards in the wake of the #Oscarssowhite campaign, started in 2015 by writer and activist April Reign. That hashtag, born out of Reign’s “frustration with the fact that no people of colour were nominated for any of the acting categories”, as she puts it, has become a rallying cry for awards diversity.
The Academy paid attention. But progress, Reign says, has been “piecemeal”. The target of doubling the number of women and people of colour admitted to the ranks by 2020 has been met. Yet
“the Academy is still overwhelmingly white, and male,” she says. (Though statistics aren’t officially released, The Hollywood
Reporter’s analysis suggested the current voting body is 84 per cent white and 68 per cent male).
The rule change has proved controversial. Reign is unconvinced. “There are enough loopholes within their new policies that you can drive a truck through them,” she says. “Movies like Gone With The Wind — which we know is not representative of people of colour — would still qualify. And if that’s the case, then what changes have they truly made? It feels like performative allyship.” And as many pointed out online, it’s possible to meet the new standards without hiring a single non-white person.
A much better criteria already exists, Reign argues, in the form of the ‘Duvernay Test’, coined by US critic Manohla Dargis, which merely requires African Americans or other minorities to have fully realised lives on screen, rather than serve as scenery in white stories. “Ava Duvernay is the gold standard,” she says. “If you start from a place of inclusion, then it provides many more opportunities.”
True change won’t come, Reign says, until Hollywood’s creaking structures are rebuilt. “It has to start at the beginning. The questions about how to make structural change has to start at the green-light level. Who is deciding what films should be made and what films shouldn’t? And through what lens are they making these decisions?” Ultimately, the Oscars will only see true representation when Hollywood does, too.