Global Courant 2023-05-06 21:04:17
Hollywood star Richard Dreyfuss, an Academy Award-winning actor best known for his role in the Jaws, said in an interview that the new diversity rules imposed by the Oscars for films to be considered for the “Best Picture” award “make me puke.”
“They make me throw up,” Dreyfuss told Margaret Hoover on Firing Line, which aired Friday night on PBS. “This is an art form. No one should tell me as an artist that I have to give in to the newest, most up-to-date idea of what morality is.”
New policies enacted by the Oscrars in 2024 will make film awards contingent on meeting two of four established diversity benchmarks. For example, one states that one-third of a film cast should be made up of “an under-represented group.”
“It’s about finding the right balance. So we want rules that make sense, that keep people on their toes, but don’t tell people what to make,” the film’s producer and Academy President Janet Yang told me. sky news in March.
Still, Yang argued that the proposed equity measures would not disqualify previous nominations dating back to 1929. “We determined that given these new guidelines, all previous nominations would still be eligible.”
During the conversation, Dreyfuss praised Laurence Olivier’s performance of “Othello,” performed in blackface in 1965. “Am I being told I’ll never get a chance to play a black man?” asked Dreyfuss rhetorically. “Are we crazy? Don’t we know that art is art?”
Hoover pressured Dreyfuss and challenged him to clarify whether people of another race should be allowed to represent groups to which they do not belong.
“Do you think there’s a difference between the question of … who gets to represent other groups … and the case of blackface explicitly in this country, given the history of slavery and the sensibilities surrounding black racism?” continued the journalist.
“It shouldn’t be,” Dreyfus replied. “Because it’s patronizing.”
The actor also discussed his decades-long commitment to improving citizenship education. In 2006, the star created the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, aimed at revitalizing the national consciousness of government and politics.
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“I think we’re in the endgame now,” he told PBS. “We could let the best idea for governance ever slip away, and we won’t even know it happened.”
“I still can’t really understand how people confuse being exposed to an opposing view on any subject with being traitor or being subversive.”
His comments come on the heels of scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a standardized test referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card”, released on Wednesday, show a worrying decline in citizenship knowledge for the average eighth grader to the lowest since they were first administered in 1998.
Senior White House officials have tried to blame Republican state governments and the pandemic for the drop in test scores. “The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further confirms the major impact the pandemic has had on student learning in subjects outside of math and reading,” said Miguel Cardona, Secretary of the Department of Education, in an official statement.
