Does the entertainment industry really care about inclusion? Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created an initiative to celebrate more of our country’s diversity in films. This initiative states that starting in 2024, for a movie to be nominated for Best Picture, it must meet a diversity threshold for two of the four following standard:
On-Screen representation, themes and narratives
Creative leadership and project team
Industry access and opportunities
Audience development
Although this is a valiant effort to be more inclusive on the part of the Academy, I personally think it is deeply flawed. This is because even if a movie has racial diversity in the senior executives on their marketing team and women getting industry access and opportunities Hollywood could still be exclusionary. Hollywood can still rely on the ableism that the entertainment industry has been built upon since its inception. From My Left Foot to Me Before You to The Upside, Hollywood has always made millions of dollars off of movies about people with disabilities without casting anyone disabled.
One 2020 film that would fit the requirements of the new Oscars’ inclusion Initiative, but is not fully inclusive, is Prom. Prom is about a group of washed-up Broadway stars that want to create a prom for a young lesbian who has been bullied. Even though I hate to criticize a movie with such an incredible cast (especially Kerry Washington), I do see one major flaw. There are absolutely no people with visible disabilities in the entire ensemble. According to RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that fights stigmas and advances opportunities for people with disabilities, 1 in 4 Americans has a disability. This means that when movies like Prom and others choose not to include people with disabilities, they are also choosing not to be representative of the largest minority group in the United States. The entertainment industry should include people with disabilities and people who identify as members of other marginalized groups, not to be rewarded, but because it’s the right thing to do.
https://time.com/5887344/oscars-diversity-rules-movies/
