The Oscars Are Going to Have New Diversity Rules by 2024
By George Robbins
The Academy Awards, or the Oscars, are an awards ceremony where people who are a part of the eponymous Academy award films for their cinematography. This applies to more than just how a film is shot as it covers topics ranging from best actor or best actress in a set of films to best make-up or even music. In other words, they go through various parts of films and award those aspects for being so well done. They also take into account just how much effort has been put into each of these aspects across all movies which have been released over the previous year. With this in mind, a lot of thought actually goes into what films or people involved with them end up getting awards.
The Oscars are in the unique position of being a set of awards that are tuned into yearly by people from all over. They take a look at films that have been nominated and then seriously give consideration to which films should have the best chance at winning. One of the biggest issues with this is that people in general have no say as to what will actually win and it is all just subjective. This essentially means that anyone not involved with the academy has no say in what actually gets to win or even what gets nominated for an award to begin with. Within the past few months, this has even been brought to a head due to the BLM protests, as well as various protests in the past about the lack of diversity in the awards.
The overall lack of diversity in films has been noted and made aware of by many different people over the past few years. The academy have tried to somewhat make up for this fact, but they are still not doing a great job at at all. In order to try and rectify this, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has introduced new rules, to be enforced from the 2024 ceremony, to ensure more diversity in their Best Picture nominees. The four categories are: Standard A: On-screen representation, themes and narratives, Standard B: Creative leadership and project team, Standard C: Industry Access and Opportunities and Standard D: Audience Development. All of these categories have to do with overall diversity in the development of the films and in order to be put forward as a nominee, movies must meet at least two of the four criteria.