Hollywood Has a Diversity Problem

The Oscars ceremony is a celebration of viewpoint exclusion.

Here’s a quiz considering some differences between the Left and the Right:

1. Which one is inclined to inject politics into areas such as sports and entertainment?

2. Which side favors neutrality at such events?

If you answered The Left for the first question and The Right for the second, you are correct. That difference illustrates one of the continuing problems with the Oscars Awards Ceremony.

This is one of those false equivalency situations, the sort memorably illustrated in the observation that “Both the rich and the poor have the right to sleep under bridges at night.”

The conservatives in Hollywood – and they do exist – are not only refraining from expressing their opinions because they believe the Academy Awards ceremony should be nonpolitical, they are silent because they know that the dominant group at the Oscars will defend your right to agree with them but if you stray, they will be unforgiving.

A telling example came at the 1999 Oscar Awards ceremony. To its credit, the Academy had decided to give a Lifetime Achievement Oscar to legendary film director Elia Kazan.

Kazan was a film giant. His greatest movie, On the Waterfront, was a 1954 Best Picture winner about corruption and intimidation by a longshoremen’s union. Marlon Brando won Best Actor. Leonard Bernstein did the soundtrack.

In 1979, Brando said, “Kazan is the best actor’s director you could ever want, because he was an actor himself, but a special kind of actor. He understands things that other directors do not.”

But a few years before On the Waterfront, in 1952, Elia Kazan committed what many regarded as a political sin. At a time when Congress was investigating Communist infiltration of the film industry, Kazan, himself a former Communist, testified before Congress and named some of the other Party members. That caused him to be ostracized by the Left.

Flash forward to the 1999 Oscar Awards when Hollywood heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro walked on stage to present the Oscar to Elia Kazan.

You could see how uncomfortable those two men were. The award was the most controversial part of the evening. Many members of the audience refused to applaud or stand.

To their credit, others, such as Warren Beatty, did stand to honor a Hollywood great.

What was the lesson?

The Left has a long memory.

And not everyone in Hollywood has the power of a Scorsese or a De Niro.

Instead of focusing on the standard forms of diversity, Hollywood needs to discover and protect viewpoint diversity. Until it does so, the Awards Ceremony will continue to be a political monologue, the product of a herd of the like-minded.

The award contenders should also develop a sense of humility. As British comedian and actor Ricky Gervais advised when he emceed the Golden Globes Awards ceremony several years ago:

“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech; you’re in no position to lecture the public about anything, you know nothing of the real world.”