Richard Dreyfuss, who starred in the classic blockbuster ‘Jaws’, said on Friday that the new diversity rules set to be implemented into next year’s Oscars “make me vomit.”
Dreyfuss condemned the new rules on PBS’s 'Firing Line with Margaret Hoover', saying that it was unjust to change the rules of art. “This is an art form. It’s also a form of commerce, and it makes money. But it’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
Starting in 2024, a film has to meet certain diversity and inclusion standards in four different categories laid out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be considered “Best Picture” at the Oscars, per Vox. The rules make diversity necessary in “On-screen Representation”, “Creative Leadership and Project Team”, “Industry Access and Opportunities”, and “Audience Advancement”.
The Academy claims that underrepresented groups include women, people of color, people who are gay/trans, or people with disabilities. The new standards set forth by the Academy are set to address low diversity in Hollywood and meet their diversity quotas. Dreyfuss himself won an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1977 for his primary role in 'The Goodbye Girl'. Dreyfuss also addresses previous winners and the effects that the new rules could have, specifically referencing Laurence Olivier's 1975 win, where Olivier played blackface in his role in Shakespeare’s Othello.
“[Olivier] did it in 1965. And he did it in blackface. And he played a black man brilliantly,” Dreyfuss stated. “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art? This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless, and treating people like children.”
Dreyfuss bashed the very idea of diversity quotas at all, stating “I don’t think that there is a minority or a majority in this country that has to be catered to like that.”
It makes sense to be angry about the rule changes too. The rules only apply to Best Picture and none of the other categories. The entire idea is patronizing, and it’s a way to signal that Hollywood is this moral and just place, when just beneath the mask is a den of debauchery and immorality. The very people who helped make the career of men like Harvey Weinstein are now coming around to preach morality to viewers while sitting in their multi-million venues drinking and eating more expensive food than the average American will eat in their life.
Hollywood has no interest in properly appealing to genuine morality, they simply wish to fein it to appease movements that represent very little at all. It makes sense why someone who understands the meaning behind the art of film would find these flimsy attempts to appease unappeasable radicals patronizing.
Dreyfuss condemned the new rules on PBS’s 'Firing Line with Margaret Hoover', saying that it was unjust to change the rules of art. “This is an art form. It’s also a form of commerce, and it makes money. But it’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
Starting in 2024, a film has to meet certain diversity and inclusion standards in four different categories laid out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be considered “Best Picture” at the Oscars, per Vox. The rules make diversity necessary in “On-screen Representation”, “Creative Leadership and Project Team”, “Industry Access and Opportunities”, and “Audience Advancement”.
The Academy claims that underrepresented groups include women, people of color, people who are gay/trans, or people with disabilities. The new standards set forth by the Academy are set to address low diversity in Hollywood and meet their diversity quotas. Dreyfuss himself won an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1977 for his primary role in 'The Goodbye Girl'. Dreyfuss also addresses previous winners and the effects that the new rules could have, specifically referencing Laurence Olivier's 1975 win, where Olivier played blackface in his role in Shakespeare’s Othello.
“[Olivier] did it in 1965. And he did it in blackface. And he played a black man brilliantly,” Dreyfuss stated. “Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art? This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless, and treating people like children.”
Dreyfuss bashed the very idea of diversity quotas at all, stating “I don’t think that there is a minority or a majority in this country that has to be catered to like that.”
It makes sense to be angry about the rule changes too. The rules only apply to Best Picture and none of the other categories. The entire idea is patronizing, and it’s a way to signal that Hollywood is this moral and just place, when just beneath the mask is a den of debauchery and immorality. The very people who helped make the career of men like Harvey Weinstein are now coming around to preach morality to viewers while sitting in their multi-million venues drinking and eating more expensive food than the average American will eat in their life.
Hollywood has no interest in properly appealing to genuine morality, they simply wish to fein it to appease movements that represent very little at all. It makes sense why someone who understands the meaning behind the art of film would find these flimsy attempts to appease unappeasable radicals patronizing.
- Article Source:
DC Enquirer
- Photo: Photo by David McNew/Getty Images / Getty Images
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