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Finally, the Supporting Actor race is the one head scratcher of the bunch. SAG did not nominate Mark Ruffalo or Sylvester Stallone, which will hurt Stallone’s chances in February. This is a hard one to call because they may seek to reward Elba after his Oscars snub, could shore up The Big Short’s win by giving it to Bale, the best performance of the movie, or they could recognize the famed talent of Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies. I’d like to see Rylance win, but I do wonder if The Big Short has all the momentum. Bale by a nose?

New Academy Membership Rules

Last week, I gave my own view of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Shocker: that did not quell it. Indeed, it raged on to the point of boycotts and culminated with the Academy announcing drastic measures on Friday to address the problem. Essentially, they will amp up recruiting of women and minorities with a very aggressive goal of doubling their numbers by 2020.

But the really significant change was a sort of Trojan horse that came along with these rules - lifetime membership is now over unless you are nominated for or win an Oscar, or you can credential your membership for three straight decades by proving involvement in the movie industry.

The real import of this change goes way beyond the minority problem - it’s going to change the tenor of the entire Academy. The L.A. Times’ analysis of the Academy is worth reading in full. It detailed that over half of the membership had not been active in the movie industry in over a decade. That’s a huge problem in some ways. The people voting for the awards are the ones who made movies in the 1970s. It’s why their tastes can be so off and stale sometimes.

On the other hand, it seems somewhat unfair to not grandfather in the individuals who were active for three decades in the past, but are retired and no longer there. Perhaps they’ll address that.

Overall, one wonders if these drastic rule changes are a disproportionate overreaction to a problem that does not begin or end with the Academy - it is the problem of Hollywood at large - or whether they are a measure that the Academy long wanted to adopt, and the controversy was the easy way to backdoor it. I, for one, continue to applaud the Academy’s efforts in this area, and they have now become the leader of the pack in Hollywood, as they should be. This is why that institution has persisted and become vibrant over the nearly nine decades of its existence. The racial composition of the Academy is the same as the racial composition of the guilds and the industry at large - it is not reflective of the racial composition of America, but neither is Hollywood is a whole.

The changes may also mean a more interesting and fun job for those of us who try to predict the awards. As you’ve heard me say many times before, the Oscars have gotten incredibly predictable with the explosion of precursor awards that make everything a fait accompli by the time the envelopes are open. Now, with a constantly shifting Academy membership, it will be much harder to discern what “their” tastes are, or to look to history and statistics to make guesses.

One can hope, at least.

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