The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this week announced a set of diversity-focused new rules that will govern eligibility for the Best Picture Oscar starting in 2024. And Tucker Carlson, naturally not a fan, devoted a segment on his Fox news show Thursday to complaining about it with guest Mark Steyn.
“The Academy Awards have announced that by 2024 all feature films will need to meet several ‘diversity’ requirements in order to win Best Picture. To satisfy the Academy, filmmakers can hire an African-American or Native American lead actor or, among many other things, they can ensure that at least 30% of the film crew has ‘cognitive or physical disabilities’,” Tucker said, misleading his audience by obscuring what the actual rules are.
There are three ways that a film can satisfy the criteria for crew diversity — the film only has to do one of the three things. One of those options is that “at least 30% of the film’s crew is from the following underrepresented groups: Women, racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, and people with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing.”
In other words: at least 30% of a film’s crew should be made up of people who are not straight white men. Not an impossible obstacle by any means. You can read the new rules here.
But Tucker carried on with this complaint session with guest Mark Steyn, who Tucker introduced as a ‘legitimately serious student of film.’
“This does seem to be like a kind of turning point. Do you think that it is?,” Carlson prompted Steyn.
“We used to mock the commies for doing things like this — making politically compliant art,” Steyn said, even though the rules don’t have a subject matter requirement.
“This is the death of art. This is art by quota, and there is no future in it.”
From there, Tucker and Steyn went in on the idea that Hollywood is already collapsing anyway.
“I think you could make the case that films are declining as a medium of influence in our society,” Tucker said.
“But this tells you a lot about the ability of creative people to create in an environment like this. Can anybody have a clear thought, can anyone be creative right now?”
“No,” Steyn said to kick off a rant about how it’s a shame that we care more about comic book movies than the opera. “Because creativity depends on truth, and actually creativity is in decline. Over the last hundred years we’ve actually lost the ability to do certain things, like opera or representative oil painting.
“But we said it doesn’t matter because now we got new things like pop songs and sitcoms and motion pictures, and we can’t do any of those too. Hollywood has been propped up for the entirety of this century by mid-20th century superheroes, mostly created around 1964 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, all the Marvel ones that have now turned Hispanic, Gay, transgender, muslim, but which people still go to see because of what was done in 1964. And then middlebrow English literature like JK Rowling with Harry Potter or Ian Fleming with James Bond. We’re dead creatively.”
Steyn then started talking about the infamous Harper’s letter, which Steyn thought didn’t go far enough.
“They don’t realize they’re in the crosshairs now. They’re in the crosshairs, and they don’t have five or ten years to turn this thing around,” Steyn railed. “If you don’t want to be doing the socialist department store operetta, you guys have got to speak up now. Because this is the death of art.”
And then Tucker ended the discussion with this declaration: “Any movement that hates art and nature — and they hate both those things — is a very dark movement.”
