Motion Picture Academy's New Standards for Diversity at the Oscars Kills Artistic Expression

I’ll break down each of the four standards categories here. For the sake of brevity each will concern a list of seven ethnic minorities, and a secondary list that includes females, LGBTQ, and/or those with physical disabilities.

The studio and/or film company has multiple in-house senior executives from the listed groups on their marketing, publicity, and/or distribution teams.

Overall this does not appear to be an overly intrusive set of criteria for studios to meet. A nominal effort will probably be enough to qualify, with Category C being the easiest given that appears almost to be an ‘’honor system’’ threshold; they can simply say they offered those positions, and the acceptance by POC individuals is not shown as a requirement. Plus we need to ask just how beneficial it is to say that they have people in minority ethnic groups working for free in order to meet diversity standards.

The flaw in the thinking here is that all of this appears to be the priority, and not the art itself. It strikes one as amazing that there could actually be a movie that is universally praised as Oscar-worthy, but then finds that it is prevented from consideration for falling short of these category requirements. Consider that a film can be artistically of the highest order but then be eliminated because the marketing division lacked diversity. Think of the uproar if a big-budget war epic becomes disqualified because its crew of hundreds was found to be only 29% diverse.

In "Northern Exposure,’’ they said ‘’Repetition is the death of art." That said, then social mandates has to be regarded as the handicapping of it. Film is to be regarded as artistic expression, and it is to be regarded as a wide open vista of opportunity. This is the folly of this mandate from The Academy. They want to narrow the scope of the ‘’acceptable’’ films and this will create a dichotomy in the industry, with what are regarded as the ‘’elite’’ films becoming more uniform in their delivery.

This is what happens when the Academy projects its problem onto others. Years back, when there was an "Oscars So White’’ controversy actor Robert DeNiro came out to say that Hollywood’s monochromatic Oscars was proof that we are a racist country. They were overtly racist, but it was our fault. In similar fashion the Oscars have admitted they have a race problem, so their solution is to force the studios into compliance. The result is imposing Affirmative Action onto art.

Notably there is one under-represented group that did not make the list of demographically-targeted labels: Conservatives. Talk about a microscopically small subset in the industry vastly in need of more exposure in entertainment -- even the pedophiles in Hollywood enjoy more coverage and protection than avowed Republican performers.