Deadline’s Pete Hammond hit all the big points from today’s live-and-video membership meeting of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—Oscar show revamp, producers hired, revenue diversifying, inclusion program full steam ahead.
President Janet Yang and Chief Executive Bill Kramer are promising much, and already beginning to make good on the promises, not least by holding the first of what are promised to be annual meetings open to the Academy’s 10,000-plus members.It was like a much-needed airing-out of the Academy closets—and as dust poofed up from the nooks and crannies, lots of small details made Saturday’s meeting an event worth monitoring.For starters, the audience laughed out loud, according to my best report, when Kramer acknowledged that members haven’t actually liked the Oscar show lately.
It was something the administration definitively learned from a member survey—not the first, but the only one in a long time from which candid, negative feedback was publicly shared.For the film Academy, this in itself is a revolution, the kind of transparency that has gotten lip service in the past, but has rarely if ever materialized.Supposedly, there’s much more to come.
Early in the meeting, the Kramer/Yang team promised to post on their member site a recap of doings at each and every meeting of the Board of Governors.
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