The Motion Picture Academy Of Arts And Science Goes Global
Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it had invited 322 people to join this year, many remarked upon the large number of younger invitees, women and minorities among them.
Also, about 36 of them were born outside America or the UK, that is unprecedented in the history of the 88-yr-old organization.
Just 2 years ago a number of foreign-born filmmakers started showing up on the list of invitees, and they were not members of the Academy.
The Academy has a long and complicated history with international films and filmmakers.
The organization was created in Y 1927, primarily by senior executives at Hollywood studios, and, in its first 20 yrs, it was almost entirely financed by their operations.
These men and women envisioned the Motion Picture Academy as a way for the promotion of their films, but also their industry. They hoped people would come to regard Hollywood movies as a respectable art-form.
Louis B. Mayer, who was responsible for the creation of the Academy, strongly encouraged its voting members to celebrate the contributions of at least a few international filmmakers each year.
The first best actor Oscar winner was German Emil Jannings, who left town after the onset of talkies, for which his thick accent rendered him unfit; the 6th was Brit Charles Laughton, who stayed and became a huge star.
Selections like these were intended to convey that Hollywood welcomed, and the Academy rewarded the best talent, regardless of its origins.
But really, no affirmative action was necessary, because the British, French and German industries evolved to the point where more than a few of their films were on a par with the best of Hollywood’s.
The films were not widely seen in America, but the Academy sought them out and acknowledged several of them with best picture nominations: England’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934), France’s Grand Illusion (1938) and England’s Pygmalion (1938) before the war, and England’s 49th Parallel (1942) and In Which We Serve (1943) during it. (The Academy also presented Noel Coward with a special award for In Which We Serve.)
By the end of the war attitudes towards foreigners had hardened for many Americans inside and outside of the Academy.
For a short time, England, America’s strongest ally during the war, was excepted indeed, the highly-acclaimed British film Henry V (1946) was recognized with four Oscar noms, including best picture, and its director-star Laurence Olivier was honored with a special award. But even that nation soon became a subject of Hollywood’s ire, as it began imposing quotas and taxes on American films in order to try to boost its own industry and financially recover from the devastation that it suffered during the war. Hardly a day went by when the de facto leader of the British film industry, J. Arthur Rank, wasn’t written about on the front pages and in the opinion columns of the Hollywood trades.
In advance of the Oscar ceremony held in Y 1948, the Academy announced that it would henceforth select and present a special award to the best foreign language film every year — and did so in eight of the next nine years, honoring Shoeshine (Italy), Monsieur Vincent (France), The Bicycle Thief (Italy), The Walls of Malapaga (France), Rashomon (Japan), Forbidden Games (France), Gate of Hell (Japan) and Samurai, The Legend of Musashi (Japan). This apparent magnanimity was said to have emanated out of a desire to celebrate great international works, but many saw right through it: it was at least as much about giving Academy members a specific way of honoring foreign language films so that they wouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to honor them in categories in which Hollywood films were also competing.
However, this new category didn’t impact non-American, English-language films, and that led to a major headache for much of Hollywood at that and after the following year’s Oscars.
During the 1948-1949 Oscar season, as transcontinental discussions failed to yield a more workable arrangement between the American and British film industries, there was considerable anti-“Britisher” sentiment in the air. For this reason, many in Hollywood were in disbelief at the number of noms their Academy had accorded to Brits — seven for Olivier’s latest Shakespearean adaptation, Hamlet, and five for the musical The Red Shoes, both of which were among the five nominees for best picture. On Oscar night, prior to the presentation of that most coveted of awards, The Red Shoes had won two crafts categories and Hamlet had been awarded three prizes of its own, including best actor for Olivier, in absentia.
Then came the moment of truth. There were audible gasps, according to eyewitness reports, and visible disgust, as one can see in archival footage, when Ethel Barrymore announced that the winner was Hamlet. It was the 1st time that a film not made by one of the Hollywood studios had won the top prize of the Academy that the Hollywood studios had created.
The following day, it was announced that the Hollywood studios would no longer finance the Academy Awards, which would spell their end.
This was interpreted by many as a show of “Sour Grapes,” but the studios insisted that the decision had been made before the Oscars and out of financial necessity in addition to growing foreign competition, they were existentially threatened by the arrival of television and a legal challenge that would ultimately force them to divest themselves of their theaters. In the end, the studios backed down and reluctantly kicked in enough money to keep the Oscars going, in much smaller ceremonies, for the next three years, after which the Academy sold the television rights to NBC and became financially independent.
Simultaneously, the Hollywood studio system did indeed begin to collapse, and the studios’ unified opposition to outside competition began to crumble, to the extent that foreign language films were provided with their own proper category, with five nominees like most others, in Y 1956. Soon thereafter, they began to sporadically receive recognition in other categories for their writing, their music, their direction and their performances, among other elements.
In the ensuing decades, as the global film community began to feel smaller, a growing number of international co-productions and studios being bought up by multi-national corporations, among other factors, this openness to excellence from outside of America increased, even in the best picture category. In Y’s 1964 and 1969, British films Tom Jones and Oliver, respectively once again won the best picture Oscar.
In Y 1965, for the 1st time, all 4 thespians who took home Oscars were non-Americans. And in Y 1970, 31 years after the Oscars at which Grand Illusion competed, another foreign-language film, the Algerian-French thriller Z, also landed a best picture Oscar nomination.
Even so, it wasn’t until fairly recently that the Academy began to embrace the idea that its membership should not only celebrate but also incorporate people from all around the world. Xenophobia may have played some part in the earlier resistance, but there are no shortage of other explanations. For one, in a world before screeners and the Internet, it wasn’t practical to involve people who couldn’t attend Academy screenings and meetings in Los Angeles, New York or London.
Then, once that obstacle was removed, the size of the organization grew rapidly, and in Y 2004 its leadership imposed a quota system on its branches that was intended to keep membership around 6,000 by limiting the number of new members that they could invite to join the organization each year. And since there has always been a general feeling that the previous ceremony’s nominees and winners deserve first-dibs at inclusion, there weren’t many slots left over for others, even highly distinguished artists.
This changed in October 2012, not long after the arrival at the Academy of new CEO Dawn Hudson and during Hawk Koch’s 1 term as president, when the quota system was abolished and the executive committees of each of the Academy’s branches were encouraged to invite more, and more diverse people to join their ranks. This was reflected in the invitations that were extended in June 2013 and after that July’s election of Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who pushed this effort even harder in June 2014 and June 2015.
Following Friday’s announcement, Mr. Isaacs told THR, “This organization is committed to increasing its diversity of voices, opinions and experiences. The branches, which set the criterion for membership, have really stepped up and looked out and about and around to recognize filmmakers and artists and crafts people who maybe might have been overlooked in the past.”
The internationalization of the membership will shape the sorts of nominees and winners that it chooses.
For instance, The Academy offers theatrical screenings of Oscar hopefuls to its members who are based in Los Angeles and New York, as do most studios, and screenings also tend to be arranged for members in other hotbeds of membership, such as London and Paris.
But for members in far-flung places, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, which means that screeners will become more important than ever. If a studio cannot afford to send screeners all over the world and/or if a movie does not play well on a small screen, it might well fall out of the game.
Nevertheless, there are people in the business who do not think that it is a good thing that the Academy is becoming more inclusive and diverse.
By Scott Feinberg
The Hollywood Reporter
Paul Ebeling, Editor
HeffX-LTN
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