The Academy Awards went big on diversity this year. The results would make a woke activist break down in tears: Oppenheimer, a movie about straight white men without a single minority in its cast, triumphed with seven Oscars, including awards for best picture, director Christopher Nolan, and actor Cillian Murphy.
But the win causing the most handwringing on the left was Poor Things star Emma Stone prevailing over Killers of the Flower Moon actress Lily Gladstone, who would have been the first Native American actor to win an Oscar.
Killers, which dramatizes the exploitation of Osage Indians in Oklahoma during the early 20th century, went home with zero Oscars, despite receiving ten nominations.
The only minorities to win major awards on Sunday were The Holdovers supporting actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph and American Fiction screenwriter Cord Jefferson.
This year, the Oscars embraced diversity in a new way by requiring all best picture hopefuls to meet “inclusion” quotas. The move was part of the Academy’s DEI pivot that began in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots.
But there was no mention of the new rules during Sunday’s telecast. Even the major Hollywood trade publications avoided the subject in the weeks leading up to the Oscars despite harping on diversity ad nauseum for the past four years.
The strange silence is perhaps attributable to the Oscars’ continued ratings woes, with viewership still way down despite last year’s slight bump.
As Breitbart News reported, the Academy’s rules spell out diversity quotas for cast and crew, covering women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and LGBTQ+ people. In addition, there are certain diversity benchmarks specified for marketing and internship programs.
The rules are vague and convoluted, offering numerous loopholes that allow for movies like Oppenheimer to qualify as “diverse.”
Equity is at the heart of the Academy’s reasoning.
“The standards are designed to encourage equitable representation on and off screen in order to better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience,” the organization said.
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