Diversity drive sees many more colored actors nominated.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Within two weeks of Dev Patel-starring vehicle “The Road Within” received the audience award for best American independent feature at Paris’ Champs-Elysees Festival, the Indian-origin actor has been named among the 2015 invitees to the esteemed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The organization has made a concerted effort to skew toward younger and more diverse class of inductees after widespread criticism of the film academy’s overwhelmingly white slate of Oscar nominees this year, reported the Associated Press.
All 20 of the acting nominees at the most recent Academy Awards were white, which inspired the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite on social media and shifted the spotlight onto the Academy in a decidedly negative fashion.
Kevin Hart, Common, and David Oyelowo are among the 322 membership invitees announced July 3.
“It’s really gratifying to see the big increases in genre, people of color, age and national origin,” academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs said.
Other notable Hollywood figures invited to join the academy include Benedict Cumberbatch, Emma Stone, Sergio Mendes, Elizabeth Banks, John Legend, and Tom Hardy.
The outpouring of criticism was “part of the conversation” that drove existing academy members to actively seek new talent in places they may not have ordinarily looked, Boone Isaacs stated. “It’s gotten folks thinking in a way that maybe they just hadn’t thought before,” she told the AP.
Membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is by invitation only. Oscar nominees are automatically considered, but other potential inductees must be sponsored by two members from their particular branch of filmmaking.