Too woke or welcome? Oscars rules explained

The film industry needs change but the new Oscar eligibility rules come unstuck with their attempt to dictate creative narratives.

One of the strongest entries in this year’s Venice Film Festival is One Night in Miami. Directed by the actress turned filmmaker Regina King, it imagines the high-stakes histrionics that might have occurred inside a Miami hotel room, on February 25, 1964, during a meeting of the black American icons Cassius Clay, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke and the NFL footballer Jim Brown. It is a movie of confident performances, passionate debates and nuanced argument. And it should rightfully receive Oscar attention.

Thanks to the new best picture Oscar eligibility rules – that 30 per cent of cast crew and actors on screen must be from under-represented backgrounds – a movie such as One Night in Miami will be a guaranteed frontrunner (although the new rules won’t be officially enforced until 2024).

This is a pivotal step in Hollywood’s slow journey towards diversity (recent Oscar snubs of black material have been especially egregious), and naturally has induced panic in some of the more trenchant sections of Tinseltown. The Trump-supporting actor James Woods called the new rules “madness”, while others took to Twitter to complain that by suggesting that at least one lead character and 30 per cent of supporting characters are from under-represented groups, it would imply the retrospective disqualification of previous best picture winners including The Departed, The Hurt Locker, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Godfather Part II and The Sting.

This is needless hysteria, but it does raise one good question about the changes: are they anti-artistic? What does it mean to be selected for best picture because, before any qualitative judgment has been applied, you filled out the right forms? And isn’t there something patronising about the establishment deigning to bend the rules for the marginalised? One of the new eligibility options, for instance, proposes that filmmakers should consider focusing the main storyline on under-represented groups.

When I interviewed Spike Lee this year he said that his 2019 Oscar win for BlacKkKlansman mattered more to him than his honorary Oscar (from 2015) simply because he won it while being “in the game”. In other words, he beat high-profile competitors including A Star is Born and the Coen brothers (for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) because his screenplay was better. He wasn’t patted on the head and given a gold star for turning up.

The Oscars, we all know, have a diversity problem. When the Los Angeles Times reported in 2012 that the Academy membership was 94 per cent white, 77 per cent male and 90 per cent over 50, it was greeted with shock and a vague aspirational commitment towards inclusivity. When in 2015 and 2016 there were no black nominees in all four acting categories, the Academy made a commitment to membership change.

In 2019 the Academy announced that the membership was now 84 per cent white and 68 per cent male. In the same year all four acting categories contained only a single non-white nomination (for Cynthia Erivo, as Harriet Tubman in Harriet) even though some of the best films of the year were showcasing diversity, eg The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Farewell, Clemency and Waves.

The problem inevitably reflects a wider imbalance in the industry. All the film sets that I visit, including those of the Hollywood blockbusters, are predominantly male and white, and often (especially in the UK) sprinkled with young martinets who are working for peanuts while Daddy foots the bills. The new Oscar inclusion rules aim to tackle that by asking for at least 30 per cent of crew members from under-represented groups (including women), with the same applying to interns.

Where the new Oscar eligibility rules come unstuck is in their attempt to dictate the creative narratives. It’s no longer as simple as white people telling white stories and black people telling black stories. Ditto for men speaking for men, women for women. To employ that decision-making strategy is a fatal error. One of the strongest black movies from last year, Waves, for instance, was written and directed by a white Texan called Trey Edward Shults (who handed his script to his black cast to be transformed by their experiences). The powerful drama The Last Black Man in San Francisco was directed by a white San Franciscan, Joe Talbot, from a story that he had written with his best friend, the black actor Jimmie Fails, who is also in the film.

In the UK the choice of an actor of Indian heritage, Dev Patel, as David Copperfield in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield was a masterstroke because it reinforced the boy’s sense of alienation from a mostly white establishment. But did that make it a non-white film? And if so, who cares?

One of the most interesting directors to have emerged in recent years is Dee Rees (Mudbound), who is black and gay. She directs exquisitely realised white male characters and when I spoke to her she said that the people who were least helpful to her during her career progression were other women in the industry (the same women whom the new rules seek to promote).

Creativity doesn’t recognise form-filling percentiles. Yes, the industry needs change. And yes, those God-awful film sets are crying out for a shake-up. But don’t tell them what to make or who to get to make it. One Night in Miami is a special film, so is The Departed. Both defined by greatness, united by talent. Proceed with caution.

The Times