US president Barack Obama has spoken about the outcry over two straight years of all-white acting nominees for the Academy Awards.
Mr Obama says the Oscars debate was an expression of a broader issue, saying: “Are we making sure that everybody is getting a fair shot?”
The president was talking to local television stations about stepping up enrolment for health insurance coverage, but Los Angeles ABC affiliate KABC asked him about this year’s Oscars controversy.
Some are calling for a boycott of this year’s Academy Awards on February 28 because no acting nominees were black.
Mr Obama said the film industry should do what others practised – “look for talent and provide opportunity to everybody”. Meanwhile, reforms intended to calm a crisis seem to have only further inflamed the situation.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decision to alter membership rules following the row over the diversity of its voters and nominees sparked another uproar around Hollywood, with many Academy members saying the new measures unjustly scapegoat older colleagues and imply they are racist.
Fiery letters have poured into the Academy, trade magazines are littered with critical opinion pieces from members and civil rights leaders and others say the Academy’s actions did not go far enough.
“We all have to calm down a bit. The conversation has become unduly vitriolic,” said Rod Lurie, the writer-director of Straw Dogs and The Contender and a member of the Academy’s directors’ branch.
“Nobody in the Academy should dignify any accusations of racism but there obviously are biases that are created by the demographics of the Academy.”
The Academy’s 51-member board of governors unanimously voted to revamp membership rules in an effort to change the make-up of the largely white, male and older association of some 7,000 exclusive members.
Though Oscar voting was previously for life, it will now be restricted to members who have been active in the industry within the past 10 years, with a few exceptions like for previous Oscar nominees. The Academy also set a goal to double minority and women members by 2020.
In a letter to the Academy, Stephen Geller, a member of the writers branch and screenwriter of Slaughterhouse-Five, accused Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs of “grey-listing” its older members.
And Stephen Furst, the 60-year-old actor and Academy member best known as Flounder from Animal House, wrote to the Academy lamenting “the insulting and unfounded generalities the Academy has made about the character and judgment of older Academy members”.
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It’s great the president is wading in on this. It’s just so disgusting that this Oscar board never give fair awards. It’s like a waste of time because they already know pretty much who will be compensated. You can work as hard as you want, it makes no difference. The mass public should just boycott them as an organisation. Period
At least now, people are beginning to see how flawed the whole show is. It’s a sham.
It has always been an unfair awards form day one
Complete sham and now they plan to have a reform at 2020? I wonder why they can’r reform now
The last Bafta awards here in the UK was the same. It is all just a scam. The awards only go their friends and lovers
That Boone woman is a disgrace to her race. She’s probably being told what to do
Do you think he will do anything about this? Waste of time
They have all the eyes of the world on them and have no choice than to do the right thing. Otherwise they lose all credibility.