On September 9, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released a new set of standards that, as of 2024, films must meet before they can be nominated for the Oscars’ top prize. Best-picture hopefuls are now being asked to fulfill at least two out of four sets of criteria, which aim to increase inclusion for underrepresented groups—people of color, women, LGTBQ+, and people with disabilities—both on and behind the screen.
The announcement marked a major milestone for the Academy, which has spent the last five years trying to diversify its annual list of Oscar nominees (and the organization’s own ranks). Take a closer look, though, and you’ll find that every recent best-picture nominee would have easily fulfilled these criteria. Should filmmakers and executives feel that their work is already done—or does this mean that with its splashy new set of rules, the Academy actually isn’t setting the bar high enough?
The new standards are split into four separate groups, each addressing a different area of the industry. The first, standard A, focuses on onscreen representation; a film can fulfill it by casting a nonwhite performer as a major character, by centering its story on underrepresented people, or by featuring a cast that is at least 30% women, nonwhite, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities. Standard B acknowledges diversity behind the camera; to fulfill it, at least two of the film’s department heads must belong to those underrepresented groups (and one of them must be nonwhite). A film also qualifies if 30% of its crew or six crew positions are filled by nonwhite individuals. Standard C requires distribution and financing companies to provide paid internships or training opportunities to members of these groups, while standard D requires a film’s team to hire multiple people from these groups at the executive level in marketing, publicity, or distribution.
I looked into whether any recent best-picture nominees would have been ineligible for the prize, according to these guidelines. As the New York Times recently noted, most productions with Oscar hopes can easily meet standards C and D, particularly if they’re released by major studios—enormous companies that already have large internship programs, marketing operations, and publicity engines in place. For the sake of argument, then, I presumed that all of the films that have been nominated for best picture in the last 15 years met either standard C or standard D. To stay eligible for best picture, they’d only have to fulfill either standard A or B.
So I surveyed the credited cast and crew from every nominee, and found—much to the chagrin of the Kirstie Alleys of the industry—that every best-picture nominee from the past 15 years fulfills at least one of these two standards. Even white-guy-dominated, white-guy-focused productions like The Irishman (with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, that’s standard B) or Inception (major supporting players Ken Watanabe and Dileep Rao meet standard A). In fact, roughly two thirds of those nominees meet both standards A and B. There’s even been an entire best-picture lineup where all eight nominees fulfill both standards: the slate from 2018, when Roma and Black Panther both lost to Green Book.
It’s safe to imagine that the likelihood of not meeting these standards increases as we descend further into Oscar history. In order to find even a semi-recent best-picture winner in any danger of doing so, though, you’d have to look as far back as 1995’s macho extravaganza Braveheart—which had a roughly 13% female cast (with no significant nonwhite characters) and a roughly 25% female crew, according to IMDb. Yet it’s also impossible to determine for sure whether Braveheart really wouldn’t qualify, absent a complete demographic breakdown that identified crew members that are nonwhite, LGBTQ+, or people with disabilities. We reached out to the film’s distributor and production company, for demographic data, just to be sure; Paramount Pictures and Icon have not yet responded to the request.