OSCARS UPDATES – THE ACADEMY

UPDATED 9/9/2020

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category, as part of its Academy Aperture 2025 initiative. The standards are designed to encourage equitable representation on and off screen in order to better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.

For the 94th Oscars (2022) and 95th Oscars (2023), submitting a confidential Academy Inclusion Standards form will be required for Best Picture consideration, however meeting inclusion thresholds will not be required for eligibility in the Best Picture category until the 96th Oscars (2024).

For the 96th Oscars (2024), a film must meet TWO out of FOUR of the following standards to be deemed eligible. (see below):

I love the new  @TheAcademy  Industry Access/Opportunities and Audience Development Standards. Just a little worried about the On-Screen Requirements, you don’t wanna see filmmakers/studios shoehorning a movie to make it eligible, and then having it smack of pandering.  I’m not knocking the system before it’s even put into place, but if we start seeing movies where the counting is obvious – 2 Blacks, 3 Asians, 1 Handicap-able, throw in a Native American to make sure we’re covered…

When it came to defining and measuring inclusion in front of the camera, behind the camera and in the companies involved, how did you set about balancing all those things?

Franklin: The BFI [British Film Institute] certainly has been doing this work for years, and those standards were really a baseline that inspired our standards. We did a lot of workshopping, a lot of meetings across the industry, meetings with all the guilds. We really put a lot of effort into getting feedback and tweaking and making sure that there was a wide constituency around these standards. To Jim’s point earlier, it’s certainly not perfect but it’s progress… READ MORE LA Times

UPDATED 7/1/2020:

Awkwafina, Matthew Cherry, Cynthia Erivo, Alma Har’el, Zendaya and two people named Ryan Murphy — one the famous content creator, the other a sound technician — are among 819 members of the global film community who on Tuesday received invitations to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Academy confirmed that it has met the “A2020” goals that it set back in 2016 of doubling, by 2020, the number of women and people of color among its membership. Indeed, it reports that it has not only doubled the number of women members from 2015 (from 1,446 to 3,179) but tripled the number of people of color (from 554 to 1,787) and nearly tripled its number of international members (from 747 to 2,107) READ MORE & SEE FULL LIST OF ACADEMY INVITEES

In April, the academy relaxed its eligibility rules in response to the coronavirus outbreak to allow movies released directly to streaming to compete for Oscars for the first time.

Last Awards Season I took a day or two off to watch screeners of all the eligible films, in time for our Philadelphia Film Critics Circle Voting. And that was when I was going to see movie screenings 2-3x a week. I wonder how it will be this year with the #OSCARS delayed til April 25, 2021 – Will I have more time or less?

Because although not a lot has been released straight to streaming these last couple months, I already feel behind as I’ve only received press screeners for 4 films. (See #MiniMovieReviews) Now some were available on Hulu, Amazon Prime and Netflix, which I saw on my own subscriptions, but anything that required a $19.95 viewing price, did not get viewed or reviewed by me …

When the theaters do open, I’m still not sure how comfortable I’ll feel about going, so I’m really gonna be relying on those studio screeners… Guess we’ll see…

#MovieNews OSCARS will be in April 2021! I suppose this will mean a date change for @PhilaFCC voting too … https://t.co/xrt5pjYmeW

— Tinsel & Tine (@tinseltine) June 16, 2020

Eligibility for next year’s 93rd Academy Awards will not be affected. However, starting the following year, the best picture category will be permanently set at 10 nominees, as it had been from 2009 to 2011, rather than the recent fluctuating number of five to 10 nominations from year to year. The goal is to try to ensure that a more diverse array of films can compete for the Oscars’ top prize.

The new initiatives, which were passed by the group’s 54-member board of governors in a Zoom meeting on Thursday, follow an earlier inclusion initiative that the academy launched in 2015 in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. That effort, dubbed A2020, was aimed at doubling the number of women and people of color in the group’s membership ranks by this year. The academy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years, is set to announce its newest class of members next month.

Even with its A2020 benchmarks achieved, however, the academy’s board — which includes such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Laura Dern, Whoopi Goldberg and newly elected member Ava DuVernay — felt that the job was not yet finished… READ MORE