Best known for roles in movies like “Jaws,” “American Graffiti” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” actor Richard Dreyfuss came out with some commentary on an upcoming rule to help with diversity efforts at the Academy Awards.
What Happened: The Academy Awards have had its fair share of controversy in recent years with deciding not to let Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak virtually at the 2023 awards show and still trying to fight a way past the slap heard around the world featuring Will Smith and Chris Rock at the 2022 awards show.
One item that has also not gone away is the lack of wins and nominations by people of color.
Back in 2016, the Academy Award nominations saw a second straight year of all 20 Oscar nominations for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and best supporting actress go to white performers, which prompted a strong backlash.
A hashtag of #OscarsSoWhite began trending and some members of Hollywood began boycotting the annual awards ceremony.
The awards show has sought to diversify its nominations and has added more people of color to the voting members for the awards.
A change announced in 2020 will take place in 2024 and has Academy Award winner Dreyfuss upset, as reported by CNN.
Under the new guidelines, movies nominated for Best Picture have to meet two of four benchmarks that include having lead actors from underrepresented groups or 30% or more of the cast and crew from underrepresented groups.
Speaking in an interview on the PBS series “Firing Lane,” Dreyfuss said the new rule changes set to take place “make me vomit.”
“It’s also a form of commerce and it makes money,” Dreyfuss said. “But it’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give into the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
Dreyfuss cited famed actor Laurence Olivier acting in the role of Othello in the 1965 film of the same name performing in blackface.
“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice?”
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Why It’s Important: The new changes by the Academy Awards are the latest in a push for diversity among nominees. These will happen for the 2024 awards show and affect only the Best Picture category and wouldn’t keep a person such as Dreyfuss from getting nominated in an acting category.
Dreyfuss has previously been nominated for the Best Actor award twice, winning once in 1978 for “The Goodbye Girl.”
“I don’t think that there is a minority or a majority in this country that has to be catered to like that,” Dreyfuss said in the interview.
The comments from Dreyfuss drew support from at least one notable person.
“Any organization that puts quotas above merit, instantly devalues their awards,” Elon Musk replied to the CNN article.
Musk is no stranger to controversial takes on Twitter and his comments came after a jury ordered Tesla to pay $3.2 million in a racial bias lawsuit in April.
The Tesla CEO said the jury would have awarded the plaintiff $0 if the company could have introduced new evidence.
The $3.2 million ruling amount is lower than the $15 million award rejected by the plaintiff last year and less than the $137 million a different jury awarded in 2021.
Alongside the new changes to the Best Picture category, there have also been cries for the actor and actress categories to become more inclusive to non-binary with gender-neutral categories.
When and if those changes happen, Dreyfuss and Musk will most likely comment again.
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