It’s Oscar season, and you know the drill: movies featuring straight white males are going to get nominated for awards, only three out the five best director category nominees will be women, and quadriplegic pygmy pansexuals won’t be represented in any of the big categories. We can see it now: It will be another PR tragedy for the Academy Awards, at least with the people they care for most.
No, not American audiences, you dolt; the woke morons on Twitter.
Thankfully, this week Hollywood outlet Variety composed a guide for Academy Award voters so they have no excuse to not acknowledge movies made by and/or starring people of color, LGBTQ people, women or other minorities. The “voting” guide did it’s best to persuade people to nominate minority-starring films for industry awards so as to avoid diversity quotas in the future and so that there doesn’t have to be another awards ceremony trending on Twitter alongside the phrase "#OscarsSoWhite."
The short diversity manual, titled “A Guide to Avoiding #OscarsSoWhite: Instructions for Academy Voters Before Filling Out Their Ballots” appeared on Variety this past Friday and seemed to be a kind of last “nice guy” warning for Academy Award voters to make sure movies by favored minorities make their lists. Nice awards show ya got here. It would be a shame if somethin’ happened to it.
The guide began with a checklist of films directed, produced by and/or starring minorities and simple instructions: “Take a moment to review this list of eligible films, putting a check mark on the ones you have seen from this year. Ideally, that will leave you with a clearer picture of how you are contributing to cinema’s evolution with your votes.” Yeah, count your check marks and ask yourself if you’re standing in the way of progress?
According to the guide, “If you did not score a minimum of 29, [based on how many POC movies voters watched] it’s not that you’re racist. The first step in all of this is recognizing there is a problem.”
Of course, Variety tried to appear as if it were just trying to make people aware of the more diverse movies out there, saying the guide “is not a demand that you vote for these films. It is not a guide for a diversity quota so more people of color are represented in the film industry.” Think of it more as an ounce of precaution. If you preemptively appease the mob now, you won’t have to deal with the diversity enforcers in 2024: “It’s deeply believed that if industry voters have enough films of diverse and inclusive voices,” Variety said, “there will never be a need for any quota or mandate, as people fear or suggest.”
Essentially, it’s like “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
But it’s nothing personal, Academy member. “You can attribute this to Donald Trump’s presidency or simply look to the ‘founding’ of the United States of America. We are delaying the evolution of film by failing to fully support a multitude of voices from the medium.” So how many voting Academy members voted for Trump? Yeah, about seven. How many of those nice progressive artsy-types wouldn’t throw their own country under the bus for a chance to feel virtuous? Again, maybe seven. Variety is offering the rest of them a chance to redeem the America that so embarrasses them by elevating garbage movies by minorities over garbage movies by white people. What hateful garbage.
