Let us begin at medium temperature. In the lead up to the Oscars, Janet Yang, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), was asked about the body’s incoming diversity rules for the best picture Oscar. A favoured counterargument has it that the new regulations, which come into force next year, will eliminate films in which white people wage wars on other white people. Sky TV wondered if All Quiet on the Western Front would qualify. “We did find that, given these new guidelines, all the past nominations would still qualify,” she said. “All the past nominations” sounds like a bit of a stretch. Who can, from this distance, really tell if The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) or She Done Him Wrong (1933) would make the grade? But we surely can (as Sky did) safely take Yang to mean all this year’s finalists would be safe. Tár is still there. So is Top Gun: Maverick. Most significantly for our purposes, the entirely Irish, entirely white, appreciably male – in terms of who is presented on screen, anyway – The Banshees of Inisherin would survive. Journalists and industry watchers have been calming more twitchy corners of the film community since the proposals were announced in September 2020. How is that going? Is everyone in a good place?
“They make me vomit!” Richard Dreyfuss said of the regulations last week.
Communities of colour have, understandably enough, shut the door on all schools – high and low – of minstrel-adjacent depiction
In a much-publicised interview on PBS TV, the veteran actor – never one to steer away from controversy – did everything short of brandishing the w-word (the one that rhymes with “yoke”). “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is,” he said. “You have to let life be life. I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”
Warming to his task, Dreyfuss went one step further and defended the almost universally outlawed practice of “blacking up”. His chosen example was Laurence Olivier’s boot-polish take on Othello from 1965. “He played a black man brilliantly,” Dreyfuss said. “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play [in] The Merchant of Venice?” Leaving aside whether Olivier really did play a “black man brilliantly”, Dreyfuss must know he is getting nowhere with this argument. Communities of colour have, understandably enough, shut the door on all schools – high and low – of minstrel-adjacent depiction. And it is for those communities to say.
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It is, however, reasonable to ask whether the academy is right to use eligibility requirements as a tool for furthering diversity. Is the category not supposed to assemble the best films from what is already out there? (Yes, it rarely does that. But we are addressing intentions here.) It is plainly within the body’s remit to promote inclusion at the production stage. It is a different matter to later rule out titles for failing to meet an Ampas-agreed quota. In that interview with Sky, Yang seemed eager to allay fears of any such gutting of candidates. “It’s finding the right balance. So, we want rules that make sense, that keep people kind of on your toes about it, but not telling people what to make,” she continued.
Is The Banshees of Inisherin concerned with an ethnic group? It depends where you’re watching from, I guess
In truth, the rules are so fantastically convoluted it seems likely most producers will, after furrowing of brows, be able to squeeze their films through the bureaucratic labyrinth. As anyone who has ever applied for a US visa will attest, the US has a gift for clerical convolution that makes the antagonists in Kafka appear like representatives of the Plain German Campaign. There are four standards to be met. Standard A demands that one of three sub-criteria be satisfied – each concerned with “women, LGTBQ people, a racial or ethnic group or the disabled”. (Is The Banshees of Inisherin concerned with an ethnic group? It depends where you’re watching from, I guess.) Standard B offers another three criteria – these relating to behind-the-scene employment – at least one of which must again be met. Standard C has to do with distribution and production. Standard D concerns marketing, publicity and distribution. Writing in the New York Times at the time of the announcement, Kyle Buchanan noted “most best-picture contenders wouldn’t have to change a thing under the new guidelines”. Yang was, it seems, speaking sincerely when she said: “It is almost a way for people to feel a bit more conscious about those things.”
Good luck getting that modest message across in the age of constant ambient outrage. Any such innovation only fuels the never-ending discontent within the bowels of social media and the clickbait factories. There is nothing much to see here. That does not mean there is nothing to get furious about.
