The Lowdown on That Oscar Boycott and Spike Lee

It’s 2016, and meanwhile, the Oscars voting academy is still 94 percent white, and 76 percent male. It’s a truth that’s getting harder for some to ignore, including outspoken director Spike Lee. In an Instagram post on Monday, Lee joined an ever-widening boycott of the Oscars for a hard-to-miss lack of diversity in the nominees.

Spike Lee himself received an honorary Oscar last November, which might’ve put Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, herself “heartbroken and frustrated” about the lack of diversity, in the rare position of having to issue a response. Calling it a “difficult but important” conversation, Isaacs promised to bring much-needed diversity into the 2016 voting class and beyond. The open letter is an unusual move for the academy, but there is a past precedent for this sort of thing.

As Isaacs notes, the ’60s and ’70s were a time where the Old Hollywood vanguard struggled to stay relevant, leading the academy to chase after younger members. It’s how Midnight Cowboy, a movie about a male prostitute carrying the equivalent of an NC-17 rating, won Best Picture in 1969. That would have been impossible to imagine that just a few years earlier, films like The Sound of Music and Oliver! were picking up Best Picture awards. As Isaacs puts it, “In 2016, the mandate is inclusion in all of its facets: gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.”

It’s becoming increasingly clear that something’s going to have to give — the ranks of boycotters are growing, and count among them Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Moore, and Snoop Dogg. Is this a long overdue change, or a case of making mountains out of molehills? Tell us what you think in the comments below.