THB #191: Dawn Hudson's Ivory Tower
THB #191: Dawn Hudson's Ivory Tower
Every time I think it’s done, they keep pulling me back in.
The L.A. Times made the effort to do a fair and balanced exit piece on Dawn Hudson today. “Did departing academy chief Dawn Hudson ruin the Oscars — or save them?”
The piece has clearly good intentions to offer balance. But like almost all mainstream coverage of The Academy, it is about a half-inch deep. Also, despite the title, it doesn’t really deal with Oscar much or in any depth. It’s really about the general internal status of The Academy.
The most telling thing about the piece is that it’s Dawn and Laura Dern defending Dawn’s leadership, with special guest stars David Oyelowo and public-facing Academy staff, David Rubin and Bill Kramer.
Equally so, making the case against Dawn are Bill Mechanic and Michael Shamberg with a pithy non-response from Terry Press.
These are “the usual suspects.” That doesn’t make any of them right or wrong. But what it tells you is that the Board of Governors remains a star chamber.
The Academy is still “this exclusionary kind of ivory-tower academy” that Dern believes was changed under Hudson.
That doesn’t mean that the 64 members of the Academy Board of Governors are bad people or ill-intended or not progressive in any way. Quite the opposite. Some of them are my favorite and most hands-on forces for good in this industry. And people sincerely like Bill Kramer in a way I have never heard when disscussing Academy top permanent-hire leadership anytime in the last 30 years.
What it means is that most of them don’t want to show their cards outside of those board meetings and their circles of friends… in the industry ivory tower. (I have a room outside, on the other side of the moat, and get invited in for a meal or a flogging, now and again.)
They all have their opinions. Few of them want to be challenged about those opinions. And feelings hold sway over facts in a lot of it. I have done deep digs with many of these people (on and off camera) and you can agree on a list of facts that lean in one direction, but then you hit long-held feelings that reflect how people see themselves and are almost impossible to overcome with facts.
Remember… most these people got to where they are in the industry by being very smart, very strong-willed, and able to manage major daily challenges throughout their careers. They come together, each as royalty from their own Ivory Towers.
I don’t have a problem with any of that. It is the core of The Academy.
The list of people who used Dawn Hudson to their own ends and are not in the L.A. Times piece defending her is shocking.
But no one at The Academy wants to discuss or admit these details.
It doesn’t really change when you have more than 50% women on the Board or the 22% of Board members of color. It’s better for everyone when you have numbers like that. But it doesn’t keep it from being an ivory tower.
There is only 1 branch-elected Latino BoG member, Eduardo Castro. Amazingly, he hasn’t worked on anything that wasn’t made for TV since 2004. An amazing, award-winning career… but a TV career.
All 3 of the “Governors At Large,” nominated by The President of The Academy, are of color, 1 Latino, 1 Black, and 1 Asian. Two serve amongst the 10 officers.
For the sake of clarity, there are now 6 Black people (11% of BoG), 2 Latinos (4%), and 2 Asians (4%) on the Board of Governors. America is 19% Latino, 14% Black, and 6% Asian.
The Board of Governors percentages actually reflect the “Hollywood” film industry more than the census number do. Movies made by and/or starring Black people are made in much higher numbers than films by and/or starring Latinos or Asians in the American industry that has always been and continues to be the heart of The Academy.
But no one at The Academy wants to discuss or admit these details.
No one wants to get into the details of the membership expansion on the last 6 years. The lack of diversity in “Hollywood” (meaning American film and TV) sent The Academy looking internationally for “people of color” to add the image of diversity in the organization. (They did a lot better with raising the percentage of women from within the American industry.)
Does The Academy, 10,000+ strong, include even 5% of each of the primary minority groups - Black, Latino or Asians - who are working in “Hollywood?” I don’t believe so. But The Academy refuses to break this statistic out publicly.
The intentions are the right intentions. I cannot repeat this often enough. Hollywood should look like America, at least. But it doesn’t. Yet, The Academy has marketed itself of having solved this problem within its ranks.
But no one at The Academy wants to discuss or admit these details.
54 members of the AMPAS Board of Governors tell you what The Academy still is. Almost none of the members live outside of Southern California. The Board is 78% white. This is a Hollywood Board. Moreover, it is a Theatrical Movie board. Of course, there are streaming and legacy television credits in their resumes… but look at how they credit themselves. Movie people!
The Academy is 30% to 40% non-American now. But the minimizing way that The Academy honors films made outside of the Hollywood system hasn’t changed at all. There are no Board of Governors members who have lived outside of America during their tenure.
I hate to say it, but outside of marketing Oscar movies to them and engaging them with international events to enjoy, the international members are an afterthought of the organization. So many of these invitees (now members) are great and worthy filmmakers. But has The Academy changed in any real way because they are there now? I would argue that it has not. It’s just become another angle to market The Academy’s surface of good intentions.
But no one at The Academy wants to discuss or admit these details.
“What surprised me, from 2011 to 2022, was the level of discord, scrutiny and challenge that someone would come up against for backing positive change in an organization. I guess I was really naive.” - Laura Dern
No. Still really naive.
Because “backing positive change” was not the driver of resistance. In fact, that kind of thinking is right out of the old cliche of asking, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Dawn Hudson is many good things. I don’t question her sincerity on everything. But she ain’t Gandhi.
Just because she thinks something is a good idea does not make it “positive change.” Really, an improved posture on issues like inclusivity is going to be positive to the vast majority within a liberal organization like The Academy. But as within any organization, how that change is made matters a lot. Positive intentions can lead to negative change. And to claim otherwise, painting anyone who disagrees as a regressive of some kind, is not positive. It is passive aggressive, sometimes violently so.
Ineffective choices using “backing positive change” as cynical cover was a major driver of resistance.
Taking the posture of blaming older members for the history of the organization and seeking, at first, to replace them, rather than add to them, was a major driver of resistance.
At that same time, holding existing members to a factually stricter set of qualifiers while bringing in new members who did not qualify by those standards, all the while suggesting that existing members of a certain age could not embrace as broad a range of film as others, was profoundly insulting, often lied about, and indeed, a major driver of resistance.
There is nothing wrong with making a choice, as an organization, to work aggressively towards a positive goal of greater inclusivity. But for it to be a positive experience, there needs to be a standard of honesty and integrity that is even higher than in “normal” operations.
Is The Academy a stronger organization in ways that the mebership believes in moving forward… even at a cost?
Does it improve The Academy’s mission to have a 10,000+ membership instead of a 4500+ membership?
What is, by the way, The Academy’s mission?
No one at The Academy wants to discuss these details. At least not in public.
The pro-Dawn argument consists of Diversity and The Museum.
I think I have said as much about diversity as an Academy issue as I can without the actual participation of Academy members and Board members being willing to speak and be challenged publicly.
So… The Museum.
Choosing to abandon the land that was purchased over years by The Academy with the intention of building a museum in, literally, Hollywood, for a rehab job of a nearly century-old building with no parking for the museum in an area of town that is deteriorating, with almost no flexibility in changing the building, that ended up doubling the budget, was a major driver of resistance.
I can go on…
The Museum itself and the choices that were made in its programming trouble a large percentage of industry visitors. Even more shocking is how many Academy members haven’t even bothered to visit the museum.
The Academy, in publicizing Dawn’s exit, claim that they have sold 550,000 tickets to The Museum in the first 9 months. That would make the museum more popular than LACMA (before the new construction), the National Museum in London, and a little behind the Victoria and Albert in London.
All I can say is that I have visited the museum, not just for a screening, 5 times in the last year and I have never seen anything suggesting thousands in attendence daily. The only lines I have seen are for the “You Win The Oscar” paid exhibit and the max line there was about 50 people.
“We would not have a museum if it wasn’t for Dawn and her vision and her commitment to the civic and cultural life of the city and the industry,” Kramer says. “She saw the need for this.”
With due respect, this is simply untrue. The Academy had been buying up land for their Hollywood museum for decades. It is possible that they may have continued dragging their feet under some other leadership. But the drive to build a museum is more than a decade older than Dawn’s tenure.
There is a thriving new community south of The Arclight (soon may it be resurrected) on that land (and in Hollywood in general). Instead of having a museum designed from the start to embrace the size and scale of movies in a place with parking and nearby restaurants and other industry attractions, the museum (none of which is in the orb) has low ceilings and everything is on televisions.
I don’t want to rehash the programming of the museum that has made a priority of addressing the absence of inclusion over the history of the movies over the history of the movies. Even as a Jew, well-versed in the history of Jews in this town, that is not my focus. I want to know where Coppola and Michael Mann and Cassavetes and Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow are.
Will things get better at The Museum?
Unclear, since they don’t seem to think they really have a problem.
This is Dawn Hudson’s legacy.
If a small group of Board members, well managed-up by Hudson, can be convinced that the only problem is that people who disagree are from the dark ages, nothing really changes. Throw the whiners a bone.
As you can see in this chart, it’s not just the COVID year of Oscar or last year and The Slap… the ratings for Oscar have never been lower than they are in the last FIVE years under Dawn Hudson. The horror of 10 million viewers or even 17 million last year is probably not the new norm. But under 30 million? That IS the new norm.
And where is the fault? Never Dawn Hudson. Anyone but Dawn Hudson.
I’m sick of repeating it, but Dawn, always choosing to be likeable, treated the distributors seeking Oscars the way some parents treat their teen kids, trying to be friends instead of acting like a parent and setting boundaries. So as the official rules for marketing have stayed tight, Hudson (consiously or not) enabled the local media to partner with the distributors to break every boundary that made Oscar special in the previous decades.
I don’t blame any of the distributors for taking advantage of the opportunity. That is their job. And Hudson’s job was to protect the integrity of The Academy and its members.
The same Dawn Hudson who early in her tenure insisted on removing members of the board who spoke about Oscar publicly has now been party to releasing Academy members from restrictions in publicly campaigning for distributors. Distributors want to push members into the media to praise and promote their awards candidates? No problem anymore. Those “secret ballot” people… go for it! Want to invite Academy members to your party? Have a trade front the party and do what you like.
None of this is life and death. But in the context of The Academy, it has been a decade of lowering the standard. And if you think that doesn’t end up playing a part in the public taking it seriously, you would be mistaken.
“I have praise for what Dawn did accomplish, but ... the academy dropped the ball on defining and promoting cinema as an art form to the younger audience growing up in the streaming era,” (Michael) Shamberg says.
(Bruce) Davis, Hudson’s predecessor as academy leader, attributes the ratings slide to the academy “hurting itself by doing its job: honoring the best movies each year.”
The Academy, under Dawn Hudson’s leadership, has decided not to protect or even emphasize theatrically released films, not only leaving unchallenged the pathway for movies that are made quite specifically for primary and often exclusive release on our televisions at home.
Not only that, but Academy inaction has also given the streamer-first movies a major financial and strategic advantage in the Oscar season, as their films no longer need to deal with the cost and potential downside of a real theatrical release. As a result, the first streaming Best Picture candidate was nominated just 4 seasons ago, 2 the next season, 4 in 2020, and 5 earlier this year.
The Academy now operates under the best rules for whatever distributors best manage them, not for theatrical films or in a way that will create greater value in the perception of The Academy, leading to more interest in Oscar.
This is not a position against The Streamers. The semantic discussion of what a “movie” is no longer matters. In reality, television and theatrical has been blurred by Academy inaction.
All The Academy has to do in order to start back in the right direction is to reaffirm what it has always been… a theatrical film organization. Set some rules. Simple. 4 week theatrical window, reporting grosses. And BAM!, the playing field is even again and Oscar means going to the movies again instead of watching your TV.
I’m old enough to remember when The Academy demanded an emphasis on seeing movies in theaters instead of on your home TV screens. 12 years ago. Even with everyone sending out DVDs already.
I would argue - and do - that Dawn Hudson never really understood what The Academy is…. what it’s mission is. She ushered her allies from Film Independent into The Academy. She used controversy over #OscarSoWhite to her advantage, deflecting criticism more than taking responsibility for challenging progress. She managed up brilliantly. She let everyone who chose to do so run roughshod over her.
Dawn has charmed me for a very long time. Even after I have written very tough stuff about her. I like her. But she is a manager of personalities, not a leader. An appeaser, not a visionary.
And yeah… The Academy does face legitimate societal changes that are not under her control. But her weakness in defending the soveriegnty of The Academy made it more vulnerable to those changes, not less.
After a decade of Dawn, The Academy faces more serious questions about its ongoing relevance than it did when she started.
I wish Bill Kramer well. I will assess his actions as I have Dawn’s… not based on my feelings about what should be done, but by what he actually chooses to do.
If I had one thing to offer, it would be that he should seek to have The Academy take itself more seriously than it did under Dawn. It is not anti-progress to understand and embrace that the weight of The Academy is what makes this organization unlike any other. Guard the gates, even as you embrace the widest swath of artists and films.
Think of The Academy as a great marketer would. Understand your product’s strengths and weaknesses. Present your product in the way that will draw the audience you seek. And fight for that image. Find the routes to all of the groups you seek, not just the one that is most obvious or fits your non-marketing agenda.
Dawn didn’t ruin the Oscars… and you can’t even address the idea that they have been saved after 5 years of record audience disinterest. She played the part of the white savior… and just watched as the value of her organization wilted while she myopically obsessed on only one idea.
Oscar does need saving… unlike Netflix.
This was never Dawn’s skill set.
Until tomorrow…