Artistic merit should never be held hostage by political gatekeeping. This is the de-liberalization of art. The academy will now tell you who you need to be, who you can hire, what your subject matter needs to be, and who your audience should be. They will preferentially reward you for how much you conform to their demands and exclude you based on your racial and political profile of you don’t.
This is not how you make or encourage great art, by fiat. By demand of result conforming to a political and ideological standard. This is prejudice. This is formally institutionalizing moral and political standards for art. And that’s a whole different ballgame from it being something conventional and social.
It’s also not clear that it will work, or help, or what the unanticipated consequences will be. Morality by command is much less subtle a force than individual pursuit of a social value. Hollywood already had a massive bias in favor of all these groups and platforms. They were already trying to score as many points as they could in these areas. Now they just have an official set of rules for how to score those points.
This doesn’t add much extra power to those who were already seeking academy approval along these avenues, but it does heavily disencentive and exclude anyone who wasn’t. Anyone who was just trying to make a movie and not check boxes of ideological currency now knows that they won’t be able to slip through and be considered in the basis of their art and accomplishment. There are formally designated gates now, certain sacrifices and appeasement to the political gods that must be made before you can pass into the inner sanctum of the academy.
I suppose you could characterize this as a kind of institutionalized affirmative action for movies. The academy has always been a bit disappointed that it can’t also make people see the movies it believes they should see. It has a habit of ignoring popular art in favor of ideologically rich content. And it’s stamp of approval does usually have some impact on how much a movie gets seen. I suppose this is just their way of saying that the awards system really isn’t for everyone (which was already the case, but now they’ve formalized it). It’s for advancing the causes and movies that they want to advance. Anyone who isn’t on board won’t be considered.
There is, of course, the possibility that this will simply drive some filmmakers, as well as some parts of the audience, to say “well then screw you and your dumb awards”. And it’s not as if the relevance of the Oscar’s wasn’t already on the wane. They have always been a private industry awards show, not a representation of some common society-wide artistic cultural value. And now they’re just dropping the illusion that they’re anything else.
In any case, this is one more example of the politicization of everything. Political law, like a religious law, must be expanded to include all institutions and areas of life. All must conform to the standards of the priesthood. It’s the Sharia Oscars. They have been made holy.
And one final concern about this program is that it’s affirmative action, and the history of affirmative action, and it’s results, are very muddled. It’s not at all clear that it works, and it tends to create a lot of problems along the way. It breeds resentment because it almost always ends up institutionalizing some form of negative prejudice, as well as a positive one. Harvard wasn’t able to run a positive affirmative action program without also actively profiling and making prejudiced decisions against Asians and Jews (who were exceptional performers in all other areas of merit but had to be excluded because of their race to make room for other preferred minorities).
It also breeds resentment and doubt because it means people can’t be sure why anyone got the position they did, since prejudicial standards are official and institutional. They know the programs are there, they know how they work, they know that exceptional students get ignored purely on the basis of group identity and less exceptional students get favored purely on the basis of group identity. It’s an official policy. And that breeds resentment. It also breeds the desire to pursue exotic group identities purely for the competitive and social-moral advantage, and breeds the desire to avoid and suppress and hide certain group identies purely to avoid negative consequences. And those aren’t great reasons for to pursue either of those values. In fact that’s kind of the problem we were hoping to fix.
Affirmative action also has other problems that economists and academics have long catalogued. By favoring group identity as a performance judge, instead of actual performance, you weaken the value placed on the actual qualities that drive success and excellent performance, you cheapen them. And that leads to less development of those qualities. But the development of those qualities is the actual end goal of affirmative action, the actual solution to the problem. The goal is for certain groups to become equally productive of certain outcomes. Whether that is all even possible, since people aren’t generic in their skills or interest, is questionable, but leaving that huge issue aside, affirmative action as a strategy has often been shown to be counter-productive to the ends it seeks. You don’t develop the capacity for equal production by undermining and watering down the standards of production.
And there are, of course, many other concerns about affirmative action, such as the mismatch theory. That by deliberately mismatching people to their environments you actually harm their outcomes and prevent their maximal success. In academia, this might be something like admitting a B student to a class of primarily A+ students, forcing them into an environment where they can’t keep up or compete and fall behind. What this might look like in cinema is a film being pushed forward on the basis of its political merits, then failing to produce the expected level of success at the general box office. The audience gets told, you must like this because it meets these political standards for excellence, and then when the audience lets you down you can castigate them for their moral failings and explain the film’s failure in terms of how recreant and debased your audience is. Unfortunately, this approach does not actually result in better ticket sales. There’s a limit to how much you can guilt people into liking the movies they should like on the basis of political and moral value.
I think if we should have learned anything from the last few years of filmmaking, it’s that going all in on political messaging as a value container can’t make up for poor investment in characters and storytelling (but often directly competes with it and hinders it). You would have thought Hollywood would have learned this lesson by watching the (often poor and didactic) attempts at filmmaking produced by the religious right. But apparently not. Apparently they think the real problem is that those guys didn’t have the really good beliefs and values. And an art in slavery to anti-traditional values will succeed where art in slavery to traditional values didn’t.
My final complaint is that this system promotes a morslity of box checking. It’s pharisaism. It favors people who know how to check those boxes and show those signals. And that isn’t a reliable means for producing morality or justice. It never has been. It’s a great way to produce a culture of virtue signalers who wear their phylacteries large upon their foreheads. And we already have that quite a bit in Hollywood. Only now it isn’t voluntary, it’s a requirement. But it doesn’t develop genuine justice or goodness. Institutionalizing morality doesn’t make it much more prevalent. It just incentivizes you to display your signals of it. You can place limits on bad behavior with forcible edicts, but it’s very hard to develop good behavior by the same means. Smart people simply learn how to navigate and game the system to their benefit.
I’m guessing that some people won’t get what the big deal is, as it has always been. This is like finding out that a state decided to reenact Jim Crow laws. Those also had plausible positive aims to provide opportunities for disadvantaged groups. But all they did was re-institutionalize racism and make it worse. And I believe this will have the same outcome. It’s a fine idea, on its own. On the face of it it makes sense, if you’re willing to accept its shallow solution to problems it shallowly conceives. But in the complex world in which we live, it’s going to be a huge problem. By making its policies official and formalized, a matter of direct force, it has set up a conflict that can only be resolved through an equal response to that force. This is no longer a dispute among people subject to personal apeso and discussion, it’s become an official declaration of rules and structures. Structures are much more rigid and require more force to adjust. They are more rigid in applying their power. Their targeting is systemic and formulaic, not individual or adaptive.
On the other hand, it’s such a terrible idea, and artists are generally such an independent and difficult lot, and politicized art has had a limited return at the box office, and the academy is already desperate to retain their relevance (and despite their best efforts this isn’t likely to help). This might just blow over or fall apart.
Making Nobody Happy 