Academy Awards establishes LGBTQ, racial quotas for best picture contenders

The Academy Awards has announced new "representation and inclusion standards," which it says filmmakers will soon have to follow if they wish for their movies to be considered in the Best Picture Oscar category. 

The standards, published on the organization's website, are "designed to encourage equitable representation on and off screen in order to better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience," the academy wrote on Tuesday. 

The rules will not go into effect until the 2024 Oscar season.

A film must meet two of the academy's four new standards to be considered as a best picture.

Among them: casting "one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors" from "an underrepresented racial or ethnic group;" ensuring that "at least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles" are made up of women, LGBTQ individuals, or members of a "racial or ethnic group;" ensuring that at least two "creative leadership positions and department heads" are drawn from those demographics; and offering "paid apprenticeship and internship opportunities" to members of those groups, as well as "people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing."

The initiative is part of the organization's "Academy Aperture 2025," what the organization describes as "the next phase of the Academy’s equity and inclusion initiative furthering the organization’s ongoing efforts to advance inclusion in the entertainment industry and increase representation within its membership and the greater film community."

“We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting, essential change in our industry," Academy President David Rubin and Academy CEO Dawn Hudson said in the press release.