This Sunday, the most awaited event for the cinematographic industry happened: the Oscars! It took place in Los Angeles and it was marked by great productions nominees. Also, the expectations for this edition were very high since the Barbenheimer phenomenon to the extremely disputed main categories.
However, this year the Academy implemented some policy changes in the Best Picture category. The action happened eight years after the #OscarsSoWhite movement, showing the slowness of the Academy to promote little changes. These recent changes can be a new chapter for a history marked by a lack of diversity and inclusion.
A history with low (or any) diversity
That the Oscars have a long history, everyone knows. The first ceremony happened in 1929 and since then, it has turned into the most famous cinema award. With big winners in all the categories, it is admired by the industry all over the world. Except for one point: its diversity!
Historically, the Academy showed that love nominates men for the categories. According to the analysis of USC Annenberg, from 1929 to today, only 17% of the nominees were women and, as a consequence, of all the winners, only 6% were women.
Besides the low gender diversity, there is also a lack of inclusion of Afro-Americans and people from other ethnicities. Of all the 13.444 nominees, only 6% were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. More shocking than that is the fact that only 2% of black women were nominated to any category.
Also, through the years, there were very few openly LGBT nominees in the ceremony. It can be seen by the fact that the 2024 nominee, Colman Domingo (Rustin), was the second openly gay actor to be nominated for Best Actor, by interpreting a gay person. The first openly gay actor indicated for this category was Ian McKellen, 25 years ago.
As can be seen, inclusion and diversity aren’t the Academy’s favorite topics. For this reason, the critics have increased over the years, putting more pressure on the organization for real changes. The awards have been willing to include changes but in slow steps. In this way, a new attempt was made: creating some diversity rules.
New standards, big changes?
From this year on, the Oscars adopted new requirements to provide more diversity in the cast, technical team, and professionals from behind the screens. So, the movies that want to be eligible for the Best Picture category must attend two of the four standards.
The criteria was inspired by the British Film Institute Diversity Standards and it is divided into four standards. Standard A is about representation on-screen, on the themes and narratives; Standard B embraces creative leaders and project teams; Standard C is related to industry access and opportunities; and Standard D is about audience development.
Some of the exigences that the standards bring are: either the protagonist or an important support actor is from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group; the movie tells the story of one of that underrepresented group (LGBTQ community, women, disabled people or different skin colors and ethnicities people); at least two of the creative leaders must be from one of these groups; the film’s production or distribution companies have to have trainees from underrepresented groups; etc.
And these new policies have already shown up on the Oscars 2024 nominees. For the first time in history, three movie nominees for Best Picture were directed by women. Barbie by Greta Gerwig, Past Lives by Celine Song, and Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet are these great productions. Unfortunately, only Justine Triet was nominated for Best Director.
Another win for diversity was the nomination of Lily Gladstone for Best Actress. The star of Killers of the Flower Moon was the first Native American to be nominated for this category. The storyline of this movie is about the forgotten story of the Osage tribe.
These great achievements happened thanks to the new diversity rules. But, as much as there seem to be a lot of modifications in the way to choose the nominees, the changes aren’t that big. The standards were made only for one of the 23 existing categories at the Oscars and they were really basic requirements to bring more inclusivity to the ceremony. So, in the matter of changes, they were only little ones.
A representation just for show
Those who usually follow the Academy Awards, notice a slow diversity growth in its history. However, is it a real desire of the Academy to bring more inclusion and representation?
There are amazing productions, actors, technical teams, and professionals who are from underrepresented groups and were left out of the nominations. It is not a coincidence that Greta Gerwig and Celine Song were left out of the nominees for Best Director this year or that Lupita Nyong’o didn’t receive any nominee for her acting in “Us” (2019).
The Oscars have a long tradition of being snobbish with some productions. And usually, the underrepresented racial/ethnic people get understated by that. Evidence of this is that, in the 2024 edition, only 20% of all the nominees were non-white people. And it is worth reminding that the new inclusion standards were already implemented.
Of course, the diversity rules were a good attempt to bring inclusion, but if the organization wanted to change and “rewrite” all those years of no representation, it would have made it already. It seems like the Academy created the standards just to say that it was being inclusive, even if in practice, it wasn’t real.
This “more inclusion” idea is more for appearances than reality. It is the way that the Academy found to “prove” that they had brought inclusion, when in fact, it was only hiding behind a veil.
The article above was edited by Beatriz Oliveira.
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