The Academy responds to call for diversity by just adding goddamn everyone

By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky | June 29, 2016 | 8:58pm

Aux Features Film

Facing criticism about its overwhelmingly older, male, and white membership and increasingly vocal concerns about the film industry’s ongoing diversity problem, the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Science, the honorary organization responsible for awarding the Oscars, has responded by… well, trying to add seemingly goddamn everyone it had, for one reason or another, forgotten to invite into its membership. As part of a major overhaul, the Academy sent out an unprecedented 683 membership invitations today to film industry professionals, almost half of them women, and 41% of them people of color.

The invitation list is a who’s who of Hollywood mainstays who were inexplicably not Academy members, international heavyweights, and big-deal up-and-comers. A large part of the push seems to have come on the director front, a seemingly endless scroll of invited directors that includes Catherine Breillat, Park Chan-wook, Lucrecia Martel, Julia Loktev, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Karyn Kusama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mary Harron, Mia Hansen-Løve, Lynne Ramsay, the Wachowskis, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, James Wan, Maren Ade, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Souleymane Cissé, Patty Jenkins, So Yong Kim, Ryan Coogler, Ramin Bahrani, and a whole lot of other people who aren’t older white dudes. (Ken Loach was also invited.)