*Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs released a statement on Monday expressing her heartbreak and frustration over the lack of diversity among this year’s Oscar nominees, and pledged to make “big changes.”
“I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes,” said Cheryl in the statement which you can read in full below.
For the second year in a row, Hollywood is being blasted for failing to nominate artists of color in any of the major categories. As a result, Spike Lee has announced plans to boycott what he called the “lily-white Oscars,” while Jada Pinkett Smith, Tyrese Gibson and “Straight Outta Compton” producer (and Oscar voter) Will Packer criticized the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
EUR/Electronic Urban Report caught up with Boone Isaacs on the red carpet at The King Legacy Awards & Benefit Gala in Los Angeles Monday night, and we asked her opinion about black Hollywood’s Oscars criticism.
“I hope that everybody understands that this organization is completely committed to turning this narrative around,” she said.
She also confessed that last Thursday’s Oscar nominations were a “little bit of a shock,” because “we’ve been working for a number of years trying to increase the inclusion of people of color and women in the Academy. I really thought this year we were going to make some strides. So it was very disappointing that-that did not happen.”
Boone Isaacs explained that the box office success of a film does not influence Academy voters.
“That’s not how we vote,” she said. “We have 17 branches and each branch represents a major aspect of filmmaking and each branch makes the nominations.”
Cheryl acknowledged that if more people of color were greenlighting films then it would certainly change the composition of Academy voters and prevent a repeat of #OscarsSoWhite.
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