Academy takes historic action to increase diversity

[best12bars]

Posted: 1/22/16 at 4:41pm

Major rule changes were voted into place today, including "term limits" for non-active industry members.

 

The changes are retroactive for all current members, but will not affect this year's voting or awards.

 

Beginning later this year, each new member’s voting status will last 10 years, and will be renewed if that new member has been active in motion pictures during that decade.  In addition, members will receive lifetime voting rights after three ten-year terms; or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award.  We will apply these same standards retroactively to current members.  In other words, if a current member has not been active in the last 10 years they can still qualify by meeting the other criteria.  Those who do not qualify for active status will be moved to emeritus status.  Emeritus members do not pay dues but enjoy all the privileges of membership, except voting.  This will not affect voting for this year’s Oscars.

At the same time, the Academy will supplement the traditional process in which current members sponsor new members by launching an ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity.

 

Read on!

Updated On: 1/22/16 at 04:41 PM

[Luscious]

Posted: 1/22/16 at 6:01pm

It's not going placate everyone, but at least they're doing something.

[Call_me_jorge]

Posted: 1/22/16 at 6:23pm

i don't think they understand how long ten years is.

[javero]

Posted: 1/22/16 at 11:15pm

Interesting.  Thanks for the sharing, best12bars!

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 8:32am

"members who represent greater diversity".

 

Members only represent talent I hope?

 

I demand some gay actors to be nominated next year as well as some 70+ actors.

12% of the population is gay and 12% is 70+.

So I want to see them nominated, otherwise it is discrimination.

We all know that being gay, age, or any other personal aspect deserves a nomination in itself.

Get out of here.

Updated On: 1/23/16 at 08:32 AM

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 2:50pm

You get out of here. 

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 3:17pm

Forcing the nominees to be diverse in skincolor, basically nominating on race is the epitome of racism.

 

If the nominations are based purely on talent and performance any outcome is possible. No, it won't always be as diverse as you like or include all your favorite races but thank god the Oscars were not based on that, at least until now.

 

So next year we can expect a black person to be nominated in every category because it is mandatory?

Updated On: 1/23/16 at 03:17 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 4:05pm

Dave.  Your notion of a meritocracy is fallacious.  FALLACIOUS.

 

You must know it, otherwise you wouldn't be such a nudge about it.  "Oh yes well only the BEST!"  Uh-huh.

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 4:15pm

You know what is fallacious?

Pretending to be (or actually being) upset that your favourite race is not nominated this year.

 

What on earth do you want? Judging anything aside from achievements/performances is completely psychotic in this case.

 

In fact, the people complaining about this need immediate help for their psychosis and a punishment for enlarging the race gap. Or at least a muzzle to prevent more harm.

 

Updated On: 1/23/16 at 04:15 PM

[Jane2]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 4:24pm

omg Dave, enough already! Don't you think about anything else?

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 4:27pm

I didn't start this craze. Turn to the complainers please.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 4:48pm

Your logic process is positively Palinesque!  Why don't you go take a spot of  tea with Charlotte Rampling?

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 5:09pm

I would love to drink a cup of tea with anyone that is against race separation.

 

With that said, if I were an Oscar judge, I would refuse any command to nominate on race.

And if I were a black person, I would seriously doubt the sincerity of my nomination next year.

Updated On: 1/23/16 at 05:09 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 5:21pm

"We're a bunch of racists," [Danny] DeVito said at the Sundance Film Festival, following backlash after only white actors were nominated for the top Oscars categories, news outlets reported.

 

But the very BEST racists!

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 5:29pm

BEST actors is they only thing that counts don't you think?

 

Anyone pulling race into this is actually a bunch of racists.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 5:48pm

Your naïveté is matched only by your certitude.  

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 5:56pm

naïveté: forcing to nominate black people, the epitome of racism, is the solution.

Updated On: 1/23/16 at 05:56 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 6:03pm

Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything.  If you think diversifying the voting members is "wrong," you're a simpering delicate little white flower.  But the BEST simpering delicate little white flower in the business.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 7:14pm

Well, in Eastern Europe, at least. 

[sabrelady]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 7:28pm

Perspective folks:

?

 

‘I KNOW THIS IS NOT A BLACK WORLD’

Segregation in the Milwaukee region is a problem that dates back to the first arrival of the area’s black community

DANIEL DALESTAR TOUCH

MILWAUKEE, WIS. — On weekday afternoons, Gaulien “Gee” Smith, a prominent Milwaukee barber and businessman, walks out of the Gee’s Clippers shop on North Doctor Martin Luther King Dr., steps into his shiny new limited-edition pickup truck, and begins the 20-minute drive to a parallel universe.

He heads north. Past vacant lots and vacant storefronts. Past the boundary of the city’s north side, where almost all of his customers and almost everybody else is black. He crosses into the suburb of Glendale. The stares begin.

Glendale is home to an Apple Store and a Brooks Brothers and a Swarovski. And white people. A whole lot of white people. Smith, a charismatic 45-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, doesn’t need the probing eyes as a reminder.

The white people are why he’s there in the first place.

Smith makes the trip across the invisible race border to pick up two of his sons, one from a private school and one from an elite public school. He chose the schools, in part, for their whiteness.

“I refused to ever send my child to an all-black school,” he said. “Because I know this is not a black world.”

He has considerable authority on the subject. He has spent his whole life in Milwaukee, the most segregated place in America.

Segregation. The word conjures images of the Deep South, a Jim Crow past of snarling police dogs and whites-only toilets. In fact, it is a national problem that has long outlasted the era of openly racist law. It persists, five decades after the U.S. government passed the anti-discrimination Fair Housing Act. It persists under the country’s first black president. It persists in a place barely farther south than Toronto.

“It feels like sometimes, in some ways, when you come to Milwaukee, you went back in time 60 years,” said Ansaar Gandy, 29, a black bartender and demolition worker.

Milwaukee itself is deeply divided, its road overpasses serving as racial barriers. But the most startling divide is between the city and its suburbs.

Milwaukee, population 600,000, is poor, strongly Democratic and 40 per cent black. Its suburbs and exurbs, slightly more populous than the city and known as the “WOW counties,” are wealthy, strongly Republican and white.

Exceptionally white: 96 per cent white and 1 per cent black in Washington County, 95 per cent white and 2 per cent black in Ozaukee County, 94 per cent white and 1 per cent black in Waukesha County.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in any other city. Where you can go under a bridge or cross a freeway and it’s just — completely segregated,” said Sal Blando, 24, a white Waukesha resident and a friend of Gandy. They met at the chic Middle Eastern restaurant where Gandy works, one of Milwaukee’s most diverse hangouts. “I think it’s just ingrained in us, from the time we’re born, that you’ve just gotta stick with your group of people. Which is absolutely the most ridiculous thing ever.”

They don’t even share their shared joys. One Sunday this fall, an all-white crowd jammed into Matty’s, a sports bar in Blando’s Waukesha city of New Berlin, to cheer on the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Twenty-five minutes away, at the sleek Skybox sports bar Gee Smith opened in Milwaukee next to Gee’s, the Packers crowd was entirely black.

The city has pockets of diversity, notably in the hip Riverwest district. But there are so few white visitors to the north side that a white woman approaching a house is liable to be mistaken for a social worker. Black visitors to the WOW counties are often met with conspicuous suspicion.

“It’s just where we live. It’s sad,” Smith said, resigned, in a booth at the bar. “I don’t have to deal with it as much because of where I work. I’m around African-Americans 98 per cent of the time.”

This is common. Researchers from the Brookings Institute and elsewhere have deemed the Milwaukee region the single most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Other academics quibble with the precise rankings. But there is no disputing the despair of a black community surrounded on all sides by inaccessible white riches.

The disparities are vast. The Milwaukee region, said professor Marc Levine, director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, has America’s biggest gap between black and white employment rates, second-biggest gap between black and white poverty rates and one of the biggest gaps between black and white incarceration rates.

Segregation is a symptom of these problems. More importantly, segregation is one of the reasons why the problems exist.

The separation of whites and blacks isn’t just a moral shame. It makes black lives worse in tangible ways. The isolation of Milwaukee’s African-Americans in impoverished all-black neighbourhoods stunts their earning prospects in a region where the suburbs are generating all of the job growth. It forces black children who don’t have prosperous parents like Smith into troubled schools. In a city with 145 homicides last year — Toronto, with a population four times larger, had 56 — it heightens their risk of early death. And it lets suburban politicians safely ignore their interests.

“Segregation is definitely part of this witches’ brew of racial inequality in Milwaukee,” Levine said. “And I’d say it’s both a cause and an effect.”

For a while, Milwaukee followed roughly the same racial trajectory as other cities in the Rust Belt. Europeans established ethnic enclaves. Blacks arrived from the South. Racist landlords, lenders, realtors and neighbourhood pacts confined them to particular urban areas. The manufacturing sector collapsed. Black poverty and crime spiked. Whites moved to the suburbs, taking tax revenue with them.

The difference is what happened next. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, some affluent and middle-income blacks eventually made their way to the suburbs themselves. Milwaukee’s black community, which arrived later and accumulated less wealth, stayed put.

Or, maybe, got shut out.

[Dave19]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 8:44pm

FindingNamo said: "Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything. "

 

So it's ok if all nominees happen to be white if they happen to be the best that season?

Good. Then what's the fuss about?

 

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 8:55pm

So the mountains and mountains and mountains of research that documents institutional bias over the last half century is meaningless.   You think it's just going to work out as a fully functioning meritocracy when the voting body in charge of deciding what is "the best" happens to be 93% white, 76% males and with a median age of 63?   THAT, little man, is completely adorable.  Delusional, but adorable.

As I said before, it's a fallacy.  

 

And you announcing "What's racist is saying something's racist!" doesn't make it true.  You're like a schoolyard child saying you've had a cootie shot.  You can't just rubber/glue your way to a conclusion that is satisfactory in the real, actual world.  Maybe up in Palinland or someplace.

[Taryn]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 9:04pm

1) The epitome of racism is not, in fact, diversifying the Academy membership.  It's probably something more along the lines of, I dunno, hundreds of years of slavery based on skin color.  You know, something along those lines.

2) The insistence that diversification attacks some sort of purity of talent recognition is laboring under the assumption that white people are the best at everything in film.  It also makes the assumption that white people got their jobs over people of color on a totally level playing field wherein they were simply more talented.  Look at the casting breakdowns for Hollywood films sometimes and take a look at how often lead roles in major films are marked for only white and white-passing actors, even when there's no narrative necessity for the characters to be white.  There is no "the nominations are based purely on talent."  There is "the nominations are based on the talent of the films that are mostly made by people in power in the industry, who are overwhelmingly white men who tend to foster other white men."

3) There's literally nothing in this action about forcing Academy members to nominate people of color.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 9:12pm

^^^ More like DaveNein

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 1/23/16 at 9:14pm

More like Dave19 is a crazy race troll.