From the New York Times news section:

The Oscars Now Have D.E.I. Rules, but Some Say It’s Just a Performance

How “Oppenheimer,” a movie about the men who developed the atomic bomb, met the new standards.

By Jeremy W. Peters and Brooks Barnes

Jeremy Peters and Brooks Barnes spoke to current and former film industry insiders about Hollywood’s grappling with representation on and off camera.

March 8, 2024

The national reckoning over racial justice after the killing of George Floyd

My impression is that the term “racial reckoning” has largely been dropped from hard news sections of newspapers (e.g., political news) after the Biden Administration figured out sometime in mid-2022 that the George Floyd craze was a vote loser and put out the word to the MSM to ease off. But the soft sections in the back of the book weren’t CCed on the memo, so still adore the concept of the racial reckoning.

spurred many of the country’s most distinguished institutions into action, few more so than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

After years of criticism for overlooking female directors and actors of color, the academy announced a torrent of diversity-oriented changes. One high-profile move involved the academy’s most coveted trophy: To qualify for the best picture Oscar, films had to fulfill a new set of diversity and inclusion standards.

This new rule, enforced for the first time for this Sunday’s ceremony, is complicated and expansive.

A checklist of four categories and nine subcategories cover almost every aspect of the filmmaking pipeline. Diversity in hiring—actors, directors, makeup artists, publicists, interns—is considered. So is the movie’s plot. To qualify, films must show that they meet two of the four main categories of representation: onscreen (actors, plot), offscreen leadership (set designers, makeup artists), training programs and marketing. …

But critics from an array of perspectives in the film industry have described the standards as the equivalent of tinsel—flimsy and showy—doing more to gild Hollywood’s image than to help people the movie business has long overlooked.

Caption: An image from the movie “Oppenheimer” that shows Cillian Murphy in a crowd that is very homogeneous.

Executives at some of the major film companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to appear anti-inclusion, said that the diversity mandates have changed little about how they make movies, largely because the standards are so easily met.

The director Spike Lee, whose films often explore the country’s tortured history with racism, has said that while he thinks the academy’s “heart is in the right place,” the standards contain “a lot of loopholes.” Mr. Lee, who declined to comment further, has also said that nothing will change unless the studio gatekeepers who greenlight films come from more diverse backgrounds. …

… Then there is “Oppenheimer,” which received 13 nominations, and is widely seen by awards handicappers as the front-runner for the top Oscar. The film has profound themes and euphoric reviews — exactly the kind of work the academy often honors.

But because of its historical context, the cast is nearly all white. The biographical film, directed by Christopher Nolan, is set largely during World War II, when the military and most of American society was still segregated. Its plot — about the classified program to develop the atomic bomb — is centered on powerful and privileged men who work at the nation’s most elite academic institutions.

The Manhattan Project was a hotbed of white male privilege. It’s amazing the Fat Man bomb went off at all without Hidden Figures to check von Neumann’s math.

“Oppenheimer” still easily met the diversity requirements for Best Picture.

… Proponents of the standards said they were never meant to be a panacea for Hollywood’s representation problems but a way to start a larger conversation about diversity.

… The academy has been under criticism for years, especially after the “Oscars So White” movement in 2015 and 2016, when voters put forward all-white acting nominees.

They say that DEI is dying, but the NYT has to still be deep in thrall to DEImania to publish an article complaining that the Academy Awards’ new quotas didn’t stop Christopher Nolan from making a serious, original movie on an important topic intended to lure grown-ups with three digit IQs back to the movie theaters that made $900 million at the box office.

Too bad Google Gemini AI wasn’t around back when Nolan cast Oppenheimer to help a lesbian Samoan get the title role instead of Cillian Murphy.

Here’s my review of Oppenheimer from last summer.

… As loose as the new rules appear to be, there are still issues of exclusion. More than 250 Hollywood insiders signed an open letter in January imploring the academy to revise its standards to include Jews. …