Have you heard about Aperture 2025?
It may sound like a Roland Emmerich sci-fi movie, but it’s actually more frightening. And much more controversial.
It’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s latest initiative to make Hollywood more equitable and diverse—more woke—by changing the rules by which films are eligible for Best Picture nominations.
Here’s how it works: Starting in 2024, producers will be required to submit a summation of the race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status of members of their movie’s cast and crew. If a particular movie does not have enough people of color or disabled people or gays or lesbians working on the set—and what is “enough” will be determined by a knotty tangle of byzantine formularies—then that movie will no longer be eligible for an Oscar.
Not surprisingly, the plan is not being universally applauded in Hollywood. Critics say it’s invasive, anticreative, opens the door to privacy issues, and is spectacularly unfair to actors and crew members, who may want to keep their sexual orientation or health profiles to themselves, not to mention to producers and directors who have enough to worry about while shooting a movie than to be saddled with the thankless task of tallying up the identity markers of their creative partners.
“I mean, why aren’t animals in this?” sneers one industry insider. “What if the main character is a horse?”
Last year, the Oscars drew an all-time low of 9.85 million viewers—less than what an episode of The Big Bang Theory used to get. At its height in the 1990s, the ceremony was pulling in as many as 55 million viewers in the United States. Even into the 2000s, it was drawing at least 40 million. But by the 2010s, the numbers started falling into the 30 millions and, by that decade’s end, had dropped further, into the 20 millions. The audience for the last pre-pandemic Oscars, in February 2020, was 23.6 million, less than half of its one-time peak.
“They just don’t want to hear from the public. They don’t want to get ideas from the members. They have circled the wagons in this bubble,” says Michael Shamberg, the Oscar-nominated producer of Erin Brockovich. He argues that the Academy has been merely shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring calls for a much more drastic course correction. “There’s an iceberg up there, and they’re sailing toward the iceberg and the captain isn’t asking anybody for help. It’s a perfect storm of inertia.”
That iceberg appears to be getting closer and closer as the ceremony continues to grow duller and duller every cycle, becoming something like an infomercial for a product nobody wants to buy. Last year’s was so excruciating, comedian Bill Maher cracked that the Academy seemed to be saying, “We dare you to be entertained.”
“It’s filmmaking by affirmative action,” adds an Academy member who, like several people interviewed for this story, asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation and loss of work opportunities.