Daydreaming About Daylight At Hollywood’s Film Academy
deadline.comHere’s a thought for a sunny morning: Wouldn’t it be nice to see a “Daylight Slate” in charge of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?If precedent holds, next month will bring the election or re-election of almost one-third of the Academy’s 54-member governing board (three governors are diversity appointments).
A month later, the termed-out David Rubin will be replaced as president, and at some point the group will complete its search for a new chief executive, to replace Dawn Hudson, who is leaving.That confluence of changes brings the rare opportunity for a sudden re-set—but only if the incoming leaders are not simply a new version of the old (Hudson and Rubin will influence the choice of a new CEO), and if there is any point on which they can actually agree.So let that point be “daylight”: a commitment to transparency and member engagement.
It’s simple. It transcends specific disputes about the Oscar show or the make-up of the Academy. And it’s surely in order at an institution that, like many others, has a tendency to clam up when communication is most needed (as in the aftermath to the Will Smith slap, when self-righteous formal pronouncements and background whispers supplanted an open discussion that should have taken place).To be talking about a “re-set” at the Academy could seem bizarre.
After all, the group has gone through an actual revolution since 2015, when the #Oscarssowhite campaign led first to a diversity-oriented doubling of the membership and then to race-and-gender awards standards under a pair of five-year plans, the second of which, called Academy Aperture 2025, has yet to be fully implemented.
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