Normally the best response to political correctness at the Oscars is to laugh at it. Whether it’s Lady Gaga singing a song about campus rape culture or Leonardo DiCaprio taking a break from his lovely, fossil-fuelled, jet-setting life to lecture the billion-strong TV audience about the scourge of climate change, a chuckle is usually enough to puncture the Academy’s woke windbaggery.
But not this time. As of today, PC at the Academy Awards has become a genuine problem and a genuine threat to artistic freedom. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to give it its full name, has announced that movies hoping to compete in the Best Picture category will, from 2024, have to conform to certain ‘criteria’. They will need to be sufficiently ‘diverse’ before the Academy will consider them. This is properly shocking. It smacks of identitarian McCarthyism.
In a bid to boost representation and inclusion at the Oscars — the only two buzzwords that matter in the 21st century — the Academy says that only movies that include a desirable number of people from various ethnic and social groups will be considered for the film of the year award.
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