Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, will introduce new “inclusion standards” for films that aspire to be nominated for best picture. The Academy’s new criteria, effective from 2024, measure both onscreen and behind the scenes makeup of crew based on ethnic and gender diversity, and only films that meet the standards will be eligible for the Oscars’ top prize.
The demand is that “underrepresented groups” – which include women, racial and ethnic groups, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities – must be involved at levels that meets the Academy’s standards in at least two of four areas:
- On-screen acting and storylines
- Creative leadership positions, departmental heads and crew composition
- Paid apprenticeships, internships and training
- Audience development, from publicity and marketing to distribution
The last three behind-the-screens categories are effectively demands for positive discrimination and race/gender profiled hiring policies within the production, distribution and financing companies. The first, which is outlined below, deals with the cast.
The on-screen standard will now inevitably promote more roles being written specifically for ethnic minorities and women, and while that of course is the entire point of the Academy’s new rules, it is interesting to note that, according the a 2020 study black, Asian and minority ethnic representation on screen in the UK is already at 22.7%, despite this demographic making up only 13% of the working population.
The new rules are set to exacerbate an already controversial trend: the casting of women and ethnic minorities in traditional white male roles. This is especially problematic in period dramas, and the risks are obvious: historical films about times when the pivotal roles in society were all occupied by white males will be much harder to make or will have to be subjected to a “woke” revisionism whereby characters are dramatically metamorphosed to change their gender or race – such as we have already seen in the BBC drama The Hollow Crown, where Margaret of Anjou is portrayed as mixed-race or Troy: Fall of a City, in which Netflix cast a black actor to play Achilles.
This phenomenon – that Western (white) culture is singled out as uniquely deserving of being hollowed out and modified to fit a multicultural agenda – is what the academic Eric Kaufmann calls “asymmetric multiculturalism” in his book Whiteshift, where he dissects the identity based reshaping of Western politics and culture and calls for a ‘cultural contract’ where everyone is allowed to preserve “secure, culturally rich ethnic identity as well as a thin, culturally neutral and future-oriented national identity.” Because the alternative is to accept the threat that western culture will suffer a ‘death by a thousand cuts’, which may sound dramatic but when has a culture been changed enough to be considered under threat? It’s a power play from the left, who has an insatiable appetite for egalitarian causes to mobilise their bases, but it is only in the west that all cultures must be equal – there is no such demand for Muslim countries, for example, to incorporate Christian or far Eastern cultures. That’s why, while the Oscars’ new rules may seem like an absurd, but trivial, detail, the sort of which we have come to expect from ultra-woke Hollywood, it is too sinister to laugh at: it is part of a cultural movement that aims to change Western culture and manipulate our perception of history for political gain.