Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that #OscarsSoWhite
The Academy was founded as a union killer
By Nina Aron
As the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag continues trending, many people feel indignant. But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, the Academy’s founding is entwined with the union-busting of Hollywood’s first movie mogul, Louis B. Mayer.
The Academy’s purpose, from the very beginning, was to curb unionizing efforts, and its awards were designed to shore up the “star system.” Mayer once said, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them.”
And now, 89 years after he helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, some of those stars are rejecting Mayer’s notion with personal boycotts.
Jada Pinkett Smith, whose husband, Will Smith, was denied a nomination for Concussion, announced she will not attend the 88th Academy Awards ceremony on February 28 because no black actors were nominated.
Today, director Spike Lee posted a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. to Instagram, with a long post saying he and his wife, Tonya Lewis, will also sit out the Oscars.
Every year, Lee wrote, his office phone “rings off the hook” — journalists calling to ask how he feels about the lack of diversity among nominees. “For once, (maybe) I would like the media to ask all the white nominees and studio heads how they feel about another all-white ballot,” he wrote.
I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes.
— Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs
Mayer was born in Minsk and raised in New Brunswick, Canada, before he turned a little vaudeville theater in Boston into a multi-million dollar film empire — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In the 1920s the men who built film sets — carpenters, electricians, painters — began to unionize, which meant their pay rates would be standardized and they’d get overtime. As head of the studio, Mayer wasn’t happy. When he began building a massive family beach house in Santa Monica, he hired just a few of the skilled guys he knew from the studio, and got the rest of the labor on the cheap.
Mayer’s biggest union worry, though, was what would happen when the actors, the “talent,” decided they, too, wanted unions. To stop that from happening, Mayer and a few other film execs created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “The “Arts and Sciences” touch was genius,” writes film historian David Thomson, “because it made you think the Academy had always been there, arranged by God and Harvard and Albert Einstein.”
The first Academy Awards were held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929. Tickets to the 15-minute ceremony cost five bucks. With the advent of television, the cult of the film star exploded, and the Oscar statuettes came to be coveted career-makers.
As lack of diversity among Oscar nominees stokes an anger the Academy won’t be able to ignore, it’s worth remembering that its awards were created to stave off change. They were meant to stroke actors’ egos and mollify those looking to organize against Hollywood’s status quo.
When your own host — this year it’s Chris Rock — chimes in calling the ceremony the “White BET Awards,” you should probably look pretty seriously at embracing some change.
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