Will the Motion Picture Academy Take Richard Dreyfuss’s Advice?

Commentary

Richard Dreyfuss criticized the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ new Oscar rules in, as they say, no uncertain terms.

The answer to my title question, however, is almost certainly “no bloody way”—even though Dreyfuss is an Oscar-winner himself and starred in several of the most financially successful films of all time.

The management of the Academy—and a good part of its membership, alas—is far too “woke” to begin to face reality or themselves.

Ditto, the Writers Guild of America, which is currently on strike.

As a member of both, I receive their emails, most of which, inadvertently, read like the Babylon Bee

Nevertheless, Richard—and I call him Richard because we have been friends since the early 1970s, even before he starred in and produced my first screenplay “The Big Fix” in 1978—expressed the views of a few of us, at least, when he said about the Academy’s new Oscar inclusion rules:

“They make me vomit.”

He spoke this obvious truth about those rules on PBS, of all purveyors of groupthink. Good for him.

In case readers don’t know what Richard was referring to—and many won’t because so few, with justification, care about or even watch the Oscars anymore—the key here is that, as of 2024, in order to be eligible for “Best Picture,” one-third of a movie’s cast must be of “an underrepresented group.”

This is so anti-art it makes the proverbial head explode, but just as a reminder it essentially negates all or most of the films of David Lean, Akira Kurosawa, Howard Hawks, Federico Fellini, John Huston, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles, just to name a few.

Perhaps John Ford would have slipped through on some of his films by using a sufficient number of Native Americans, assuming they were authentic, but not on any of his Oscar-winners such as “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Quiet Man.”

As Dreyfuss points out, these rules also would have disallowed Laurence Olivier—arguably the greatest actor in the English-speaking world on stage and screen since World War II—from playing Othello.

Perhaps we will soon see computer-bowdlerized versions of “Laurence of Arabia” without Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn, both of whom played Arabs.

The irony in all this is that interfering in the arts, making rules for artists, is inherently square and unsophisticated and will produce cowardly, useless art.

Modern Hollywood thinks of itself as “progressive” but is anything but in the honest sense of the word.  It’s monumentally conformist, seemingly producing films for each other so the makers will appear woke and be accepted by the group.

This, of course, also means making films that look inward and are of little interest to the public.

That’s the opposite of what Dreyfuss has been doing for much of his life, not just in film and theater, but elsewhere.

Besides his acting, he has for some time headed an organization dedicated to, according to its website, “prioritizing civics education.”

Bravo for that.

Over the years, Richard and I have argued about politics. He thinks I have gone too far to the right. I think I’m basically the same and the world has shifted left. But whatever the case, the absolute necessity of civics education in our country—indeed “prioritizing” it, as he says—and the value of what he’s attempting is inarguable.

In a way, if he could make this initiative work, it would be more of a gift to our people than his many wonderful performances.

Richard’s personal contribution notwithstanding, however, there is a tragedy in the growing insularity of woke Hollywood.

Not so long ago, motion pictures were referred to as the art form of our time. Everyone wanted to see the latest film. These days, you don’t even know what they are.

In the larger sense—to be blunt—culture, the arts, are virtually dead because nothing has taken the place of the cinema.

Forget what Andrew Breitbart said of politics being downstream of culture. There is no culture, on either side, to be downstream of—unless you consider 25 seconds on TikTok as culture.

It’s fine to revive the great art of the past, as is done here in The Epoch Times, but the poverty of the present is palpable.

Conservatives, as I have written before, play a big part in this poverty. They are more than willing to support the local philharmonic and have their names in the lobby, although Beethoven no longer needs their support. The arts of today do, but they have little or no interest in them. You get what you … don’t … pay for.

More to the point, however, many are looking today for a truly conservative cinema. That, too, is an anti-art endeavor. The cinema, or any art form, shouldn’t aspire to be political in the traditional sense. It should be the genuine response of the artist or artists to the world that all of us live in.

Yes, you could make a political analysis of “The Godfather,” if you chose. But that’s not why you are riveted by it.

The same goes for the Oresteia or King Lear or any of the masterpieces of the past. They go beyond political interpretation into the realm of the spiritual.  Great art is what succors our common humanity.

For a time, the cinema gave us that. No longer.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its new rules aren’t helping us get it back. Quite the contrary.

They should listen to Richard.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.