Would Oscar Inclusion Standards Disqualify Any Best Picture Winners?

Andy Samberg answered this one for us back in 2020.

Here’s the short version (because we’ve gone over this). Every best picture winner in the Academy’s 98-year history — from the silent-era film “Wings” in 1929 through the most recent political action epic “One Battle After Another” this past March — clears the Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards. That also includes “Oppenheimer,” the film directed by Christopher Nolan, with whom Elon Musk had no problem until this past week. And Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” whenever the Academy gets a look at it, would also clear the inclusion standards, and it’s not because Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy.

Musk spent the back half of the week yelling at a movie that doesn’t come out until July. The world’s richest man went on X to announce that Nolan “desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award,” then sharpened it again on Friday: “Who specifically is the asshole who added DEI lies to Academy Awards eligibility instead of it just being about making the best movie?”

He doesn’t actually want an answer. But I’ll give one, and it’s going to be boring, a huge problem for everyone amplifying him. The standards don’t do what he thinks they do, and the entire history of the category proves it.

A quick refresher, because nobody screaming about these rules has read them. The Academy announced the standards in 2020. They phased in over two information-gathering years and became a best picture requirement for the 2024 eligibility year, which is why “Anora” — Sean Baker’s $6 million indie dramedy that walked off with five Oscars at the 97th ceremony — was the first winner to compete under them, followed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.”

A film has to meet two of four standards. Again, two of the four. Not all four.

Standard A is on-screen: a lead or significant supporting actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or a 30% ensemble drawn from two underrepresented groups, or a storyline centered on one. Standard B is the creative team: department heads, broader crew, or 30% crew composition. Standard C is the distribution or financing company’s paid apprenticeships and training. Standard D is in-house senior executives or consultants across the company’s development, marketing, publicity and distribution.

So let’s run the test. Take all 98 winners and ask which one the standards would have knocked off the ballot. And the answer is…zero. Absolute zero.

Samberg was among the first to call out the inevitable crowd of bigots and MAGA-enthusiasts that would wail and scream. In November 2020, two months after the standards dropped and more than three years before they meant anything, he was on an episode of the Variety Awards Circuit podcast promoting “Palm Springs” when the subject came up. His quote holds up better than most of the think pieces written since:

“The parameters, if you look at them closely, you can have the ‘whitest’ cast in the history of cinema and still very easily meet them by just doing a few key roles behind the camera. People who have problems with it can fuck off.”

That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. The standards reward including underrepresented people somewhere in a major studio movie’s pipeline, and the two-of-four math is loose enough that period pieces and war films clear it without anyone on set thinking about it.

NOTE: The data collected on studio leadership at the time is incomplete, and even with that missing info, the clearance was still met.

Before anyone misreads that table the way Musk’s replies will, let’s make it clear: a dash in the A or B column should not be read as an “X” or a red mark. It does not mean the film failed that standard. It means we don’t have the documentation to score it, which, for movies made since 1927, is most of them.

The Academy doesn’t keep a diversity ledger on the second-unit crew of “Cavalcade.” Studios of that era didn’t track it, the data was never compiled, and reconstructing the precise composition of a 1930s production team is mostly guesswork. So those cells get a dash. A dash is “unknown for the period,” full stop. It is not “this film was too white to qualify,” and anyone reading it that way has the logic backward.

This is the part the standards’ critics keep getting exactly wrong. The Academy knew retroactively grading the crew of a 90-year-old movie would be incoherent. That’s why Standards C and D exist, and why they’re written the way they are. C and D don’t ask what a studio did in 1941. They ask what the distributor does now — whether it runs paid training programs and whether women and people of color are represented in its marketing and distribution leadership. It challenges those in leadership positions to think beyond their yachts and tennis clubs.

Which brings up the structural point worth being precise about, because I cleaned this up in the data. C and D belong to the distributor, not the movie. They’re scored once per company and applied to everything that company released. If Netflix clears C and D — and it does — then it clears them for “Roma,” “Mank,” “Don’t Look Up” and every other Netflix title, the same way Warner Bros. clears them for “Casablanca” and “Barbie” alike. You can’t have a distributor that’s a yes for one of its films and a no for another in the same year. It’s the same company. A and B are where films legitimately differ, because they concern the movie itself.

Thirty-seven winners reach the bar on that studio-side floor alone because the on-screen and leadership records for their era aren’t documented, not because anyone determined those films came up short. The other 61 don’t need the floor. Fifty-six winners have a documented Standard A basis on cast, ensemble or storyline. And there are another 30 that have a documented Standard B basis on women or underrepresented people in creative leadership. The supposed “DEI requirements” are, for most of the canon, just a description of what these movies already were, set against a fairly low benchmark.

The “you couldn’t make these today” or “they’d never qualify” crowd should pipe down for a bit. Films like “Ordinary People,” “Schindler’s List,” “Titanic,” “The Departed,” “Spotlight,” and “Oppenheimer” clear the hurdle with flying colors, and not merely on a technicality.

And here’s a detail the naysayers miss entirely. Standard B’s headline doesn’t say “hire two women.” It’s two department heads from underrepresented groups, with at least one from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. Films clear it anyway, and those that lean on women in creative leadership do so through the broader crew-composition path that the standards also allow.

Wendy Finerman won best picture as a producer on “Forrest Gump” 31 years ago. Thelma Schoonmaker has cut every Scorsese picture since “Raging Bull,” with three Oscars to show for it. Deborah Lynn Scott won an Oscar for costuming “Titanic.” Nolan’s wife, Emma Thomas, produced “Oppenheimer” and won best picture for it. None of that was “invented” to satisfy an upcoming 2024 rule. It’s what the rule was written to count.

The films people wave around as the “real” best pictures — the ones that were supposedly made before “Hollywood lost its mind” — tell the same story. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” “Going My Way,” “An American in Paris” and “Marty” were all distributed by studios whose modern divisions clear C and D in their sleep. The complaint that the Academy has gatekept the old greats out of contention falls apart the moment you check, because the studios that made them still exist, still release movies and still employ executives. Even the ones dubbed the “white savior” flicks, like “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Green Book,” clear the bar without question.

What’s funny is that it’s actually pretty difficult to build a movie that doesn’t meet the standards. To build one, you’d need an all-white cast with no disabled or queer characters, an all-male creative leadership with not one woman in writing, producing, editing, costume, makeup or casting, and a distributor whose modern successor can’t clear C or D.

Remember when Matt Walsh lamented that his documentary “Am I Racist?” wasn’t among the 15 shortlisted movies in 2024? And interestingly, the Daily Wire (the alt-right company founded by Ben Shapiro) distributed the film, which was on the “Reminder List,” which is the complete list of all movies that qualify, meaning they must fill out the RAISE form, which proves they are a diverse production. Would you look at that? It meets the standards for a possible (albeit horrendously made) best picture winner. Even Richard Dreyfuss’ dream of a “Black face” Othello, which he complained he wouldn’t be able to make in today’s climate, would meet such a benchmark.

So what is this actually about?

It was never about the eligibility rules. It’s the casting of Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, about which Musk has spent the week boosting troll posts, including one from Walsh, suggesting the idea that Nyong’o isn’t “the most beautiful woman in the world.” He also reposted material that mocks her co-star, Elliot Page, who also has a role in the movie. Trust me, the standards have nothing to do with any of that.

Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o because she’s Lupita Nyong’o. She’s one of the most decorated actors of her generation — an Oscar for her first feature, a Tony nomination for the play “Eclipsed,” and steady and beautiful work with filmmakers like Steve McQueen, Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler. “The Odyssey” also stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, and Jon Bernthal. But we’re not seeing too many tweets about them. Hmmm…I wonder why?

If Musk wants to argue “The Odyssey” is bad, he can write that tweet on July 18, the day after it opens. If he wants to argue Helen has to be white because Homer called her “white-armed” — λευκώλενος, if we’re doing the Greek — he can take it up with the audiobook he listens to at 1.25x speed.

One number, since we’re talking about who actually gets into the room. The first woman nominated for best picture as a producer was Julia Phillips for “The Sting” (1973). Since then, across 621 best picture–nominated films, 126 have included at least one woman in the producing lineup (or 22.9%). Within that universe, only three of those nominations have included Black women producers (no winners), and Asian women producers did not appear in this category until Kwak Sin-ae’s win for “Parasite” in 2019, later followed by Samantha Quan with “Anora.”

That’s been the bar. The Oscars didn’t change it. They asked people to think about it. Samberg had it right in 2020.