In one sense, it’s a meme. But in another, there’s a good deal of truth in the assertion that Mario Puzo’s The Godfather teaches all the life lessons one needs to know. And in light of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “rules” for diversity, it does so again.
Starting with the March 2024 awards, movies will not be considered for a Best Picture nomination unless they feature a lead or significant supporting character from an “underrepresented racial or ethnic group,” have a main storyline that focuses on an underrepresented group, or at least 30% of the cast comes from two or more underrepresented groups (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ or the disabled).
Some wonderful movies meet these requirements organically. Rather than contrive to reimagine the mafia staffed by Hispanic transgender women, or a “based on a true story” Jewish people being saved from Nazi concentration camps by a gay black man named Schindler, the stories and plots involved people who satisfied the new diversity rules because, well, that’s what the story was about.
The Godfather teaches us to “Never hate your enemies – it affects your judgment.” And indeed, it does. Contrary to what some desperately want to believe, creating nonsensical “one size fits all rules” to overcome a legacy of discrimination isn’t a by-product of love and tolerance, as proponents claim, but shifting the old hatred to the new hatred, the old racism to the new. As wonderful as it may be to open the world of cinema to new and diverse people and stories, it doesn’t require that movies be foreclosed to any film that doesn’t check the boxes that the grocery clerks of Hollywood find convenient to assure their ascension into woke heaven.
What this reflects is one of the tacit failings of the simpletons, the need for rules to guide them through the minefield of not offending anyone on the victim hierarchy. This adoration of rules is understandable, as it’s the only mechanism available to avoid making a mistake in the ever-shifting, yet perpetually certain, world of anti-oppression righteousness. It’s not good enough to make a movie about black men, if it fails to extol the virtues of gay black women two rungs above them.
And much as misogynism has been a focus of advocates against discrimination on the basis of sex, it’s a distant second to discrimination against transgender people, How is it possible that discrimination against women matters, until a transgender person cries foul and the rights of women get gleefully trampled in pursuit of accommodating their victim-betters?
People hate. They hate nazis, fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, and phobes they have yet to invent. Except most of those lumped into these ad hominen categories are merely people who fail their purity test. And it’s deeply affected the judgment of otherwise intelligent and caring people, who have lost all perspective of what they’re trying to accomplish and what they’re destroying in the process.
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A new right wing project for a new American century. Let’s not interrogate the word “underrepresented” too closely for accuracy here, or apply it too liberally. It’s more of a fundamentalist concept based on a supremacist framework. Unclear if it applies to hobbits or Na’vi.
Also, that Q loophole is big enough to fly a squadron of F-14 Tomcats through.
Any basically good idea if extended far enough in a straight line can become first a bad idea and then an appalling idea. Political correctness was bad, political correctness gone mad was worse and WOKE IS APPALLING.
Unfortunately humans are divided on which is which. For example are human rights still a good idea when applied to indigenous peoples who are inconvenient for a colonial settler state in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel or The USA.
As if someone in a minority couldn’t see greatness staring them in the face because it wasn’t reflecting themselves at all times??
I’d imagine this goal could be accomplished far easier if they let people make movies they want and only allow the judges, to be those picked from these categories.
“I have a Black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” – James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, 1983
Academy approved!
“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” —Don Vito Corleone
Happy Father’s Day.
Looking forward to a lot of Mormon and 7th Day Adventist Best Actor nominations.
Haven’t watched in years.
From reading the academy page and the updated Post story, it seems like they can get away with not meeting the criteria you listed, so long as they meet some *other* criteria, and even if they met all the criteria you list it wouldn’t be enough to make the film eligible. What you list is just the first standard, and they need to meet 2 out of the 4. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.