This past week the Academy announced that if a film wants to be considered for an Oscar nomination, they must fulfill a certain diversity requirement. Groups seeking membership or nomination must check off diversity in two of the four categories, as reiterated by Washington Post being “casting and story lines; crew demographics; employment opportunities within the industry; and marketing and publicity.”
While I wish we didn’t need a checklist or rubric to simply uplift and award great diverse films, I’ll take it to see better films recognized. If having a checklist puts training wheels on a bicycle destined for a more inclusive future, so be it. Hopefully what will follow is recognition of phenomenal films like “Parasite” that wouldn’t have been acknowledged otherwise. Maybe then, foreign film can be destigmatized and in doing so people’s film taste can expand beyond Marvel films and Tarantino chaos.
This requirement will not be implemented until 2024, but it will be truly interesting how films adjust. Will Wes Anderson finally put a BIPOC character in his films? Will Scarlett Johansson ever be nominated again now that her roles may be filled by their correct positionalities? I’m not going to be upset with people who may be forfeiting their chances of nominations and cry about the new requirements- they’re the reason we need them.
This comes at a time where UCLA reports globally women make up 40% of leading roles despite making up a little over half the global population, and that 26.6% lead roles go to minorities. For a national population slated to have a majority of currently marginalized folks by 2050, we seem to be working pretty slowly to portray what our world actually looks like in film. By implementing these guidelines, The Academy is hoping that it increases both representation and employment of marginalized folks/groups, which is fantastic since we need more than just representation of women/BIPOC/LGBTQ+/Disability communities, also needing them around the writing tables and controlling the cameras of these films.
Even with such implementations, we must still keep our eyes open to the fulfillment of such a checklist, and critique the ways in which film and film companies may subvert them or sneakily fulfill the requirements. Vanity Fair worries (and rightfully so) that “productions with Oscar hopes can easily meet standards C and D, particularly if they’re released by major studios—enormous companies that already have large internship programs, marketing operations, and publicity engines in place,” which could lead to nominees still looking like “La La Land” across the board. As these guidelines are waiting to be put into place, we can only hope they get more specific so that this is prevented from happening so easily.
We may not see it for a few years, but a more diverse Oscars is a proposition that is very exciting. Continue to critique films and the stories they tell even before the 2024 projected implementation. Listen to the discussion the film tries to present as well as who is left out of them. Expand your own film tastes, and hopefully award academies will follow suit.