Academy Awards continue to open to women and minorities

Regularly accused of being too masculine and too white, the Academy of Oscars published on Tuesday the list of 819 new members invited to join its ranks this year, made up of 45% women and 36% of "underrepresented" ethnic minorities. in the organization ” . Among the new arrivals are actress Awkwafina ( Crazy Rich Asians ), Cynthia Erivo ( Harriet ), Eva Longoria and French filmmakers Ladj Ly ( Les Misérables ) and Jérémy Clapin ( I lost my body ).

In 2016, after several years of scathing criticism of the composition of its colleges considered disconnected from society, the Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences announced a doubling of the number of women and members from ethnic minorities by 2020. "The Academy has exceeded these two objectives," she said Tuesday in a statement. If the new members accept (which is almost always the case), the proportion of women in the Academy will increase to 33%, against 25% in 2015.

Read also: Oscars: Bong Joon-ho and Parasite crush the 2020 list with four awards

Seven of the seventeen professional categories represented at the Oscars this year recruited more women than men, said the Academy in its press release. This is particularly the case in the category of actors, whose vintage 2020 sees the arrival of Zendaya, Zazie Beetz ( Joker ), the next James Bond girl Ana de Armas or Yalitza Aparicio, a Mexican native revealed in Roma who had won him to compete for an Oscar for "best actress" . As for the “underrepresented minorities” , in other words all the members not being white, their number tripled to pass from 554 in 2015 to 1787 this year, that is to say 19% of the workforce.

From 6,000 to 10,000 members

In order to meet its objectives, the Academy has become much more international in recent years, tripling its foreign staff which is now more than 2,100 (out of just under 10,000 in total). Only the members of the Academy can choose the winners of the Oscars and many believe that it is this more open recruitment that allowed this year the coronation of Parasite , the first feature film in a foreign language to win the prize for "best film" . A dozen members of the South Korean film team were also invited by the Academy on Tuesday. Its director, Bong Joon-ho, was already one of them. Almost half of the new members are not American and represent 68 different nationalities.

Read also: Could you be part of the jury for the Oscars 2020? Take the test!

To boost its diversity, the Academy also had to significantly increase its enrollment, which has grown from around 6,000 to almost 10,000 today. As part of American society is examining its racist past in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 40-something black man asphyxiated by a white police officer, the Oscars recently announced that they were going to implement new rules to increase the diversity of its selection.