Friday, February 26, 2016

Awkward Oscar Moments

The Academy Awards is the one awards show I genuinely like, and the one I try to faithfully watch each year.

I don't know how much longer my personal tradition can hold out, however, with all the stultifying political correctness that's taken over everything.

#OscarsSoWhite and all that, you know?

In any case, I love this photo-compilation, at the Los Angeles Times, "23 totally awkward Oscar moments."

As for the political correctness, here's the Times' front-page lead story this morning, "91% white. 76% male. Changing who votes on Oscar won't be easy":
With Sunday’s Oscar show, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will close one of the most contentious awards seasons in its history and open an era of historic change, as the 89-year-old institution launches an ambitious drive to diversify its membership.

A Los Angeles Times study shows just how much work the academy has to do if it intends to reflect the audience it serves — and just how aggressive the group’s new goals are.

In 2012, The Times reported that Oscar voters were 94% white and 77% male. Four years later, the academy has made scant progress: Oscar voters are 91% white and 76% male, according to a new Times study.

Blacks are about 3% of the academy, up from 2%; Asians and Latinos are each just over 2%, with both groups up slightly.

The academy has invited more women and minority group members over the last four years, but with its 6,261 voting members appointed for life, the organization’s ranks were on track to remain overwhelmingly white and male for decades.

Under fire for nominating an all-white slate of actors for two years in a row, the academy last month vowed to double the number of women and minority members by 2020. It also adopted controversial new rules that will allow it to take away voting rights from inactive members.

“Our goal is to make sure that we are active in bringing in different voices regardless of gender or race or sexual orientation,” academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs said in an interview Thursday. “Inclusiveness in this organization, that is our goal.”

Doubling the number of women and minority members over the next four years, however, figures to be daunting.

The academy has about 1,500 women and 535 non-white people who are eligible to vote on the Oscars, according to Times estimates. Based on those findings, doubling their numbers would require inviting at least 375 women and more than 130 people of color each year.

That would demand a dramatic shift in admissions given that the academy's latest class — touted as the largest and most diverse in its history — was only 322 people, most of them white men...
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