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The Oscars just announced their watershed new diversity and inclusion standards for Best Picture.Starting with the 2024 Oscars, a film must meet 2 of the following 4 standards to be eligible for Oscar’s biggest prize:
I’ve seen a lot of people saying “There goes THE IRISHMAN and MARRIAGE STORY.” Thing is... as near as I can tell, both those movies would still qualify. Each had at least 2 female department heads (standard B) and the Netflix marketing team is pretty diverse (standard D)
TREE OF LIFE would still get in. At least 2 of its department heads were female and it was put out by 2 companies, Plan B and Searchlight, with high powered female execs https://twitter.com/thesluglines/status/1303510711314690048?s=21
Here’s the thing... almost every film would still be nominated under the new guidelines. Most movies clear Standard B easily, since jobs like costume design, hair/makeup, and casting are often filled by women. Standard D isn’t hard either since publicists skew female/LGBT, too.
Standards A and C would have the most impact, and indeed, they’re the rules everyone will be talking about. But if most Oscar contenders sail easily through Standards B and D, less may change than we think.
Tapley notes something that’s a little confusingly worded in Standard B but could shake things up: At least one of the female dept heads must be from an underrepresented ethnic group. That would actually DQ a swath of films with white woman dept heads https://twitter.com/kristapley/status/1303514135292817409?s=21
Ok, a further clarification of B1: First clause says at least two dept heads have to be female, nonwhite, LGBTQ+, or disabled, but the second clause further clarifies that at least one of those dept heads has to be nonwhite, if that wasn’t already fulfilled by the first clause
The more I look at this, the more I see that Standards C and D are so easy to meet — studios simply need a robust internship program and a marketing department that’s relatively diverse — that the films those studios distribute could remain pretty homogeneous and still qualify
