Several years ago, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a movie.
It was the story of the race to be the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, a literal milestone that for a long time was thought impossible.
This was a real-life drama that seemingly had everything: three ferociously competitive men on three different continents, all with very different personalities: Wes Santee, a brash cocky American from Kansas nicknamed the “Ashland Antelope” who used brutal childhood abuse by his father to fuel his drive for glory; John Landy, a gentle modest scholarly Australian who made himself a beloved national hero when he went back to pick up a fallen competitor in a national race and then won anyway; and Roger Bannister, a tall, gangly, quietly unassuming British medical student.
The three men all came closer and closer to making history in an epic battle fought over many months in mostly separate races, but it was Bannister who finally did it, nearly killing himself as he threw his exhausted body over the line on an Oxford racetrack on May 6, 1954, in a time of 3:59.4.
He was knighted by the Queen for his triumph and quit running at 27 to become a world-beating neuroscientist.
Great tale, right?
Arguably, an even better one than the plot of “Chariots of Fire,” which won an Oscar for Best Picture.
But when I pitched it excitedly over dinner to one of the world’s most talented and famous scriptwriters, he shook his head.
“It’s a brilliant story,” he admitted. “But nobody in Hollywood will make it.”
“Why on earth not?” I queried.
“Because the main characters are all white,” he replied.
I was stunned.
“Would it make a difference if I make one of them black in my script?”
“It might,” the writer chuckled.
I was reminded of this extraordinary exchange when I heard that the Oscars now has new diversity rules which must be strictly adhered to if you want to win an Academy Award.
Specifically, any contending movie for the 2024 Academy Awards must meet two of four new criteria which include featuring a lead or significant supporting character from an “underrepresented racial or ethnic group,” having a main storyline that focuses on an underrepresented group, or at least 30% of the cast comes from two or more underrepresented groups (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ or the disabled).
I sighed loudly when I read this, which is now my body’s instinctive go-to response to any new outbreak of ludicrous woke claptrap.
Others experienced a more violent response.
Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss said the new rules “make me vomit” and seethed: “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
He added: “What are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life and I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”
The Oscars diversity rules furor follows a series of bonkers campaigns to stop non-gay or trans actors playing LGBTQ roles, non-disabled actors playing disabled roles, even non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters.
Dreyfuss, who is Jewish, raged: “Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?”
I couldn’t agree more.
What’s the bloody point of acting if you’re not allowed to act being someone you’re not?
And why this sudden frantic Hollywood push for forced extra diversity anyway?
Recent Best Picture winning movies at the Oscars have included last year’s victor “Everything Everywhere All At Once” which features a mainly Asian cast, “CODA,” which starred three deaf actors, the South Korean film “Parasite,” and the LGBT-themed “Moonlight,” which had an all-black cast.
“Black Panther,” which won three Oscars in 2019, featured a 90% black cast.
Isn’t all this indicative of an industry that’s already quite diverse!?
As for the new call for reality in casting, the 2015 Best Picture winner, “Spotlight,” told the true story of how the Boston Globe exposed a load of pedophile priests.
Should the villains have only been played by actual Irish catholic child-abusing priests?
And what happens to a movie like “Schindler’s List”?
Are Jewish people still considered an “under-represented group” in Hollywood?
If not, what should Steven Spielberg do if he wants to make another film like that which can qualify for the Oscars under the new rules? — hire some African-American actors to play Holocaust victims?
Do mob movies like “The Godfather” now have to have a quota of real Mafia people in the cast or crew?
You get my cynical drift.
The problem with these Oscars diversity rules is that once again, meritocracy is being sacrificed at the altar of exhaustingly self-harming wokery.
Hollywood doesn’t have a diversity problem anymore — it has a virtue-signaling problem.
But hey, if it gets my movie made, then I’m very happy for Sir Roger Bannister to be played by Denzel Washington.
Or perhaps, to really burnish my woke credentials, we could unleash the gender fluidity card too and have him played by Angela Bassett, self-identifying as a white Englishman for the purposes of the Academy’s new diversity rules?
Or maybe we should just stop all this box-ticking madness and let Hollywood producers pick the actors and crew who are best-suited for their films.
