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The number one film among Latinos last year had zero Latino leads.

That’s according to UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report. The Conjuring: Last Rites had all-white leads. Their data also says its opening weekend audience was 40 percent Latino — the largest of any film in the study.

That simple statistic directly contradicts the study’s headline thesis, that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content:

But this strange study provides little evidence for this conclusion. As we just saw, it often provides the opposite. Another example:

According to the study's own Table 5 (p. 43), horror draws both the highest Black (15.7%) and Latinx audience share (29.1%), while also posting the lowest white share (46.5%). Per Table 1, horror has the highest ROI in the report (2.6) — but Figure 2 shows 63.6% of horror films have casts that are 30% BIPOC or less, the third least diverse of any genre with an actual cast, after fantasy and drama.

Doesn’t this directly contradict the headline finding that “increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content in theatrical film releases?”

And that’s just the beginning.

This essay dissects the myriad problems that plague the UCLA study.

This matters, because if we actually want more diversity in Hollywood, we absolutely need better research. Otherwise we will be stuck in what I called the Annenberg Ouroboros, using bad data to fuel outrage without promoting real change.

And the reality is that UCLA’s methodology is simply too weak to justify many of its most basic conclusions.

Introduction

UCLA’s bi-annual report is coauthored by Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, the inaugural Director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative (EMRI), and Dr. Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost.

Part 1 of the 2026 report examines 109 of the top English-language, theatrical film releases in 2025. Part 2 focuses on streaming.

The report defines itself as a study of the relationship between diversity and the bottom line in theatrical films and television, and seeks to prove that diverse films earn more money.

It makes this argument in two parts. The first, the more effective section, measures the (lack of) diversity among Hollywood creatives, specifically Cast, Directors, and Screenwriters. Afterwards, the “Bottom Line” section argues that diverse audiences prefer diverse films, which drives ticket sales, and thus justifies more diversity in front of and behind the camera.

Like USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Study, UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report makes the rounds of the trades every year. This year’s study appeared in Variety, Forbes, the Hollywood Reporter, and the LA Times:

A Well-Funded Study

The UCLA Report has received substantial, highly-publicized funding this decade:

In 2021, it received $250k in funding from the California budget.

In 2022, state lawmakers invested another $1.5m in the study.

This is in addition to several corporate sponsors, whose contributions appear on the acknowledgements page, but whose contribution amounts are never disclosed.

Over the years, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, NBCUniversal, and Starz have all sponsored this report, which grades their casting and hiring decisions. This is an obvious conflict of interest; UCLA is directly measuring the products of their own sponsors.

Another conflict of interest: the Latino Film Institute, the report’s Leadership Sponsor, lists the report’s co-author as the Vice President of its board of directors, and previously awarded her $100,000 as its inaugural scholar. The report discloses the sponsorship. It does not disclose the board seat.

It’s also worth noting that there are three additional credited graduate coauthors, and four additional data collectors. Nine people worked on this study, with significant funding, which should be more than enough for proper data collection.

Numbers Don’t Lie

In the 2021 press release for the $250k grant from the state of California, Local Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (AD 51-Los Angeles) had a choice quote:

“Numbers don’t lie,” Carrillo said. “The Hollywood Diversity Report holds the data needed to effect change for both below and above-the-line workers, which is why it was critical to leverage our state’s budget to support it.”

But the numbers do lie. Whether this is intentional is obviously debatable, but the study has serious issues, ones so large as to invalidate its own headline findings.

So what did the state’s $1.75 million actually buy it?

Before getting into my substantial critique, let me acknowledge what UCLA does well. The report assembles a large amount of data on diverse employment in Hollywood, which is valuable. Its box office and audience data are also genuinely useful.

My concern isn’t that UCLA studies diversity. It’s that it has a flawed methodology, and reaches unsubstantiated conclusions, which people then repeat as if they were true.

The biggest single problem emerges in “The Bottom Line” section, where they try to argue that diversity causes financial success. This may be the case, but the study in its current form certainly does not prove it.

As I will discuss, there are five serious problems with UCLA’s approach:

• an arbitrary definition of “diverse cast,”

• confusion in how the study defines and counts a lead role,

• significant causal claims the data does not support,

• failure to control for obvious confounding variables such as theater count, budget, franchise status,

• and headline conclusions that don’t match the study’s own results.

So let’s get into it.

A Strange Range: UCLA’s Underlying Methodology

Before you can argue that diverse casts make money, you have to define what a diverse cast is. UCLA’s answer is that you take the top eight credited actors in a film, count how many of them are BIPOC, then sort the film into one of six buckets.

Here’s how they define the buckets:

0 lead roles = <11% BIPOC

1 lead role = 11% to 20% BIPOC

2 lead roles = 21% to 30% BIPOC

3 lead roles = 31% to 40% BIPOC

4 lead roles = 41% to 50% BIPOC

5-8 lead roles = Over 50% BIPOC

That’s their entire measurement process. Look at how strange this is: “less than 11% BIPOC” reads like a small share, but it actually means zero.

Fifteen of the 109 films UCLA examined in 2025 had all-white leads, which they label as less than 11%, as in this table (author’s translation of the actual numbers in red).

With eight slots, the actual possible percentage values are 0, 12.5, 25, 37.5, 50, 62.5, 75, 87.5 and 100. But instead of using those actual numbers, UCLA collapses them all into these strange ranges. Also, for some reason, instead of actually measuring the top four categories, which would be valuable, UCLA collapses them into one “Over 50%” bucket.

So “41 to 50 percent BIPOC” doesn’t mean that percentage range at all — it actually means four top-billed BIPOC actors.

Almost always. Bear with me here. A meaningful share of films don’t have eight leads, the study actually puts the average at 7.2. So in a seven-lead film, 3 actors means 42.9%, which means that the 41 to 50% category can mean either three or four BIPOC actors. The bins don’t even mean something consistent across movies. And they of course don’t tell you which films are which.

Choosing eight leads (occasionally seven) to focus on is completely arbitrary, especially when applied to 109 different films.

There are many obviously better ways to measure actual lead roles, including…

• speaking time

• screen time

But this is not what UCLA does. The report never explains why eight credited actors is better than five, ten, all speaking roles, or any other measure of cast diversity. This is problematic, because if they had chosen…

• top five leads

• top six leads

• top ten

• weighted billing

How many of their headline findings would change? We don’t know. And they don’t do the work to find out, leaving their findings remarkably fragile.

Another oddity this produces: a film with five BIPOC leads counts the same as one with eight. Why? They don’t say!

But this calls the entire study into question, and substantially limits the interpretability of the findings, especially the key one they highlight on page 3 of the study:

Once you understand the methodology they chose, the whole thing becomes painfully clear: the report began with the hypothesis that films reflecting U.S. demographics should perform better commercially, then sought to prove that claim.

But the 45.2% "coincidental alignment" is basically numerology, a religious belief in the significance of certain numbers.

The study has six bins, one of which wins every year.

And the study simply retrofits the significance every year onto whatever bucket wins.

UCLA’s “Bottom Line” is Random

I looked into every box office report from 2011-2025. Here’s a chart of the study’s “winning BIPOC percentage,” tracked alongside the growth in the BIPOC Population, based on UCLA’s own stated numbers.

It’s completely random, with no correlation to the actual BIPOC percentage of the population. It lands on the population benchmark number about as often as chance would predict. Here are the numbers listed in the studies:

Across 15 years of reports, the supposedly optimal diverse percentage wanders from year to year with no consistent relationship to the demographic benchmark, US BIPOC population, UCLA claims it reflects.

The headline finding was correct in six of fifteen years, just 40%. But only three of six bins ever actually win: 21–30%, 31–40%, and 41–50%. Guessing blindly among those three would be right about a third of the time. UCLA's benchmark does barely better than that.

Not that they ever admit that; they simply report the winning bin each year, and never note that the number moved. Look at this headline “Bottom Line” finding from the 2018 study:

The 2018 report announced 21-30% as the sweet spot for diversity.

Let’s look at 2022:

This time the sweet spot is 31%-40% BIPOC. Now let’s look at 2026:

The 2026 report now has it at 41-50%.

The headline finding is simply fitted retrospectively to whatever that year’s data show. It doesn’t predict or demonstrate anything.

As Nassim Taleb would say, it’s Fooled by Randomness.

Another term for it: numerology.

There is also no stable curve in UCLA’s data showing more diversity leads to more ROI, and the study’s own conclusions even show that, this year, the 21–30% diverse films beat the 41–50% ones.

Do you see a discernible pattern here? Where when diversity goes up, ROI goes up?

No, you can’t. And it gets worse: in six of the years they measured: 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2022, and 2025, the highest ROI films are films that are less diverse than 2025’s headline finding. In 2017, the most diverse films won, surpassing their 41-50% thesis. The next year, 2018, the least diverse films won.

That means that in seven of thirteen years — over half of the years they measured, excluding 2020 and 2021 — the effect they claim did not happen. In other words, it’s random.

And within any given year, ROI also doesn’t rise as cast diversity rises. The 41 to 50% bin isn’t the top of a trend, it’s just cherry picked randomness.

The study’s own data fails to support its headline conclusion that more diverse films produce better economic outcomes, on both counts they themselves measure: Box Office and ROI.

Another, far more rigorous study could potentially prove that diversity leads to a higher bottom line, but this one simply doesn’t.

And this is a university that was recently ranked number 11 in the world by US News.

What is a Lead?

UCLA distinguishes between two types of parts: leads and what they confusingly call “All Roles.”

The study defines a “lead role” as “the first credited actor and/or top-billed actor in a film.” One per film. No co-leads.

They define “All Roles,” confusingly, as “this report considers only the top eight actors in each film, in order of appearance in the credits.”

These categories are reflected in two pie charts in the study. One describes 108 lead actors (it doesn’t explain where the missing lead went).

The other describes 773 “All Theatrical Film Roles,” which, as per their footnote, actually only measures the top eight billed cast.

The two charts aren’t independent. The 773 includes the 108 — every first-billed actor is counted twice: once as the lead and again as one of eight “All Theatrical Film Roles”. This means the second chart can’t be read as a clear indicator of overall supporting cast diversity, because the stars are still included in it.

It took your humble Gadfly quite a bit of time to figure this out, because nowhere in the study do they mention this. I discovered it by taking the average number of roles they cite, 7.2, then comparing it to the “all roles” category.

This also means that the data from the second chart is skewed by the data from the first, dragging it towards white. If we remove the leads from the overall roles, the white share of all non-lead roles falls by 2%, and the other groups rise by about a half a percent.

Only using one lead role based on top billing skews the data in strange ways, because it arbitrarily splits ensemble casts.

As an example, let’s use Avatar: Fire and Ash, which UCLA names as one of its highest grossing diverse films. While Sam Worthington is credited first, Zoe Saldaña, an Afro-Latina actress, is clearly a co-lead, billed second. But under UCLA’s definition, Avatar counts as having only a single white lead.

They use this “one lead” system to prove a lack of representation among Hollywood leads. But they also use it another way.

Because of how they categorize supporting leads, Saldaña still counts in the “All Actors” category, and thus Avatar, one of the highest grossing franchises of all time, also lands in the headline 41–50% BIPOC category.

It can thus be cited as evidence that diverse casts make money.

These strange categorizations allow them to have their cake and eat it too: Underrepresentation in leads, overrepresentation in box office.

But it doesn’t reflect reality, or the films themselves. They don’t report the performance of the films by leads, only by “All Roles.” We don’t know why.

Of course since there’s no published dataset, no coding protocol, and no reliability statistic, a skeptical reader can’t actually see how they’re making any of these choices, only infer it.

This is part of a general sloppiness that extends even to basic presentation. In some places the report breaks white actors out by gender without extending the same courtesy to BIPOC actors.

Why? Again, they don’t say.

The Eighth Billed “Lead” Counts as Much as the Star

UCLA’s measure gives every one of the eight lead acting slots in “All Cast” the same weight, which means the eighth-billed actor with four minutes of screen time counts as much as the star who's in every scene.

Take Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which the study ranks in the 41–50% BIPOC interval. Tom Cruise is the entry in the lead chart. In the “All Roles” chart, he's one of eight, worth 12.5%, the same as anyone else. But we all know that Tom is in the movie way more than the other actors; he’s the lead. Somehow we’re supposed to forget this.

Between this and the confusing, pan-ethnic BIPOC term, the measure can't actually tell you whether audiences are responding to Black leads or whether they're fine with an Asian actor showing up for six minutes in scene 44.

So, if a white movie star is in a movie for 96 minutes, and a Latino supporting actor is in that same movie for twelve minutes, and they’re both billed in the top eight credits, they both count equally for the headline metric.

It’s almost like they just looked at this poster, counted the faces and were like, eight! There we go!

UCLA Draws Inferences the Data Cannot Support

Let’s go back to the headline quote on page three.

But there is no new evidence in this year’s study, and the evidence they do present, like the Conjuring example above, simply doesn’t prove this. Their evidence currently suggests that Black and Latino audiences prefer genre fare like horror, regardless of whether the leads are white or not. Look at the top three movies for Latinos:

All of these films have white leads, and number one and three also have zero BIPOC leads. This may be why the study chose the “strange range” method to begin with: it’s far less awkward to write <11% BIPOC Cast than, more accurately, zero BIPOC Cast. Note also that they do not break out the “Lead” category in these boxes, possibly for the same reason.

When they say in their headline quote that “America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse content in theatrical film releases,” they have to mean cast, because they do not provide data on the performance of films with diverse creators behind the camera.

They pull this finding to the top of the study, in huge letters, with almost no evidence. These are not even apples and oranges, they’re apples and orangutans.

So as we’ve seen, this study is cherry-picking at an industrial level to claim three distinct points:

1. Diverse casts make the most money.

2. Because diverse audiences prefer them.

3. We should therefore also have more diversity behind the camera.

The first two rest on a single, strange metric — top-eight billing — and it doesn’t establish either one. The third doesn’t follow from those metrics at all.

UCLA’s counts of directors and screenwriters do show real underrepresentation behind the camera, and that finding stands on its own.

Which is why this spurious logic chain is so self-defeating. The strongest aspect of the report is being tied to the weakest. If the commercial case collapses — and it does — the employment case shouldn’t go down with it. But that’s the strange structure UCLA has built.

None of this means UCLA’s other statistics are wrong. Counting directors, writers, or cast members is a valuable exercise (although as we’ll see, there are flaws here too). The problem is when those are treated as proof that one variable causes another.

Showing that more diverse casts and higher box office sometimes occur together is not the same as showing that one produced the other. It’s a textbook confusion of correlation and causation.

Nowhere does this problem become more obvious than in the films the report chooses as proof.

Many Films They Categorize as Diverse Are a Stretch

On page thirty-nine, the report names its examples: “nineteen films fell into the 41 percent to 50 percent BIPOC cast interval, including Avatar: Fire and Ash ($919.4 million).”

Wait. Ten-foot-tall, mo-cap blue aliens qualify as diverse based on the voice actors? And Zootopia 2 also qualifies, even though it features animated, talking animals?

Whatever audiences are responding to in these films, it’s probably not diversity of the actors’ voices. It took your humble Gadfly twenty minutes of googling to work out which blue actor was which on the Avatar 3 poster.

Important to note: animated foxes and bunnies don’t have a race. But UCLA never explains why performance capture, voice acting and live action should all be treated as equivalent measures of representation.

Also, the actors voicing the true leads in this movie, Jason Bateman and Ginnifer Goodwin, are both white. We do not have their data on the performance of the films with white leads, which is simply left out.

The BIPOC Problem

I’m going to keep this section brief, as I’ve written on this extensively elsewhere, including here and here. The use of the term BIPOC throughout the study is especially self-defeating. This is because the term BIPOC combines populations with dramatically different levels of representation.

As we’ll see, huge disparities are hidden by the BIPOC term, which actually obscures UCLA’s most crucial finding. You can see what I’m talking about here, in their highlight section on page 3:

The BIPOC framing makes it look like all leads are underrepresented at an equal rate of 2 to 1. But when they’re broken out (as we saw, however problematically), theatrical leads actually look like this:

The BIPOC term thus hides a deeply unsettling truth: Latinos are severely underrepresented versus their population size, dramatically more than other groups. This is particularly ironic for a study funded by the Latino Film Institute, which in itself is already a conflict of interest.

Why on earth is this not in the highlights? Why isn’t it plastered on the cover, instead of buried on page 17? It’s probably the single most valuable and important finding in the entire study, at least as far as cast goes. But because of their commitment to BIPOC, it is hidden away much later.

To show how dire Latino underrepresentation really is, if you actually break out the individual groups’ underrepresentation, here’s what you get:

Latinos are underrepresented by a staggering 7:1. This is over 3x the Black group, the next-worst category. But when Latinos are mushed in with everyone else, it brings the overall underrepresentation down to just 2:1.

The study comments on this. It’s the only time it uses the term “egregiously.”

But they’re egregiously underrepresented partially by the study’s own methodology.

Let’s try another experiment. Let’s actually make Zoe Saldaña a Latinx lead, adding just one more Latinx lead to the very small category (just three actors). Doing so increases Latino representation by 33%, and reduces underrepresentation to 5.4 to one, a massive shift. So just one billing-order change cuts the headline Latino finding by almost a quarter.

Here’s how underrepresentation stacks up in their “All Film Roles category” (which again, is actually just the eight top billed actors):

Again, a story of 4:1 Latinx underrepresentation in all roles is thus mushed together with all the other groups to yield a 2:1 average underrepresentation.

But as you can see, there’s also a large cluster of multiracial people, which creates its own problem for this kind of study.

The Zoe Saldaña Problem: Multiracial Actors

The multiracial category seems great in theory, but in practice nobody can be solely multiracial. Like Saldaña, they can only be a combination of actual races: Black/Latino, White/Asian etc.

Zoe Saldaña, of Avatar fame, is multiracial generally, and Afro-Latina specifically, so which box would she slot into?

UCLA never explains how most multiracial performers like Saldaña are allocated across categories. That matters because multiracial performers account for 8.3% of theatrical leads (9 actual roles) — the second-largest category in the chart. If we split them out into actual ethnicities, it would dramatically change their findings.

Depending on the coding rule, representation estimates could change substantially. We could just run the numbers, but again without a published coding protocol or dataset, readers cannot tell how much of the apparent gap reflects actual casting, or simply classification.

Because of this, the number of Latino or Black roles could swing wildly based on whether Saldaña is characterized as Black, Latino or, most accurately, both.

But it gets even stranger: the one specific multiracial subgroup the study uses is Black Latinx, who are reported as only Latinx. Why not Black as well? Is it because the study is funded by the Latino Film Institute?

Zoe Saldaña would thus qualify as Latinx, but not Black.

This again is strange. The study’s longest footnote includes a giant taxonomy of races, including thirty-one ways to be MENA and only one way to be multiracial; Black Latinx, in which case, they are categorized Latinx. This added one man and three women to the Latinx category.

And because of these strange practices, their own 45.2% benchmark itself can't even be checked. UCLA states the BIPOC share of the U.S. population as 45.2 percent, but the figures listed in its own endnote 18 — 20 percent Latinx, 13.7 percent Black, 13.2 percent multiracial, 6.7 percent Asian, 1.7 percent Native, 1.1 percent MENA — overlap so heavily that they can't be added, and no consistent reading of them produces 45.2%.

Also, notice how little actual work "alignment" is doing. The bin spans ten percentage points, so whether the true figure is 42.2, 43.6, or their stated 45.2, the "coincidental alignment" holds. But look again at the actual possible values: 0, 12.5, 25, 37.5, 50. No film can have a cast that is exactly 45.2 percent BIPOC, at least while only measuring eight leads. The alignment isn't with any real film — it's with the strange range UCLA invented.

But as we’ll see, even focusing on US ethnic composition is in itself problematic for blockbusters, because of…

The International Problem

The study argues for diversity based on the ethnic composition of the U.S., but never explains why this is the right baseline for a globally distributed product.

In 2025, global box office was roughly $33.5bn, of which North America accounted for $8.87bn — about 26%.

This is a problem for UCLA, because the report simultaneously argues films must “travel” internationally, while benchmarking its casting argument against U.S. demographics.

But if Hollywood is selling primarily into global markets, then why should U.S. demographics be the benchmark for commercial success? There may be an argument for that, but they never tell us what it is.

The US and Canada are under 5% of the world's population and a little over a quarter of its box office. This is important because North America isn't a scale model of the global audience, it's one wildly unrepresentative slice of it.

Benchmarking casting against U.S. Census demographics is therefore an argument about domestic demand, but UCLA never says whether that's the argument it's making.

Are Germans really hankering for more American BIPOC actors? We don’t know. Because UCLA presents no evidence for why this should be.

Race is admittedly a murky category, especially when applied to the world. But if we were to collapse it into the categories UCLA uses, minus multiracial, here’s what we get.

Let’s see how this stacks up against the underrepresentation numbers:

In this version, Asians are massively underrepresented in major motion pictures, while white people are even more massively overrepresented.

One might object that UCLA is studying American employment. That’s cool, just don’t use it as proof of global audience preferences.

And yet again, the study has its cake and eats it too with international films, especially in their “Wake Up Call” section on page 58:

But here’s the problem with this. First of all, there were massive strikes in 2023. The WGA went on strike from May to September 2023. SAG-AFTRA joined them from July to November, halting production for months and gutting the 2024 release calendar. UCLA never mentions this, in a passage that asks what more evidence of diversity’s effects anyone could need.

It’s not like the strikes were some sort of trade secret: they were covered in every major trade publication, including Variety.

Ne Zha 2 is also not even from 2024. Per Box Office Mojo it’s the number one film of 2025, and the only non-Hollywood production in the 50 highest grossing films of all time. The film also earned 99% of its $2bn in China. It barely went international at all.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s make local films for local audiences — not diversify American blockbuster casts to match the U.S. Census numbers. And notice who “its most avid consumers” turns out to mean: Chinese moviegoers. The study’s actual thesis is about American BIPOC audiences, which somehow, through reasons unknown, are supposed to mirror global audiences.

UCLA’s Own Data Keeps Contradicting Their Own Thesis

Elsewhere this appears:

With what we’ve now learned, let’s translate this highly confusing paragraph into plain english:

1. The most lucrative amount of diversity is 3-4 leads of color. That’s the sweet spot for success. Not more.

2. The least lucrative amount of diversity is 1 lead of color.

3. Zero leads of color do better at the box office than 1 lead of color.

In this paragraph UCLA once again contradicts their own thesis about diversity driving box office. They themselves say that their data reveals that the second-least diverse films perform the worst, not the ones with no diversity at all.

What a strange argument for diversity improving the bottom line: adding a single diverse lead actually reduces box office performance.

Even if we put this aside, diversity of cast still doesn’t make sense as a solo metric for success: cast diversity is tangled up with budget, genre, franchise status, ensemble size, and release theaters. The report never disentangles them to prove that diversity is what’s actually causing the success.

Have a look at the median global box office by cast diversity bin, 2025 (Table 3, p. 42):

The < 11% films earn almost double those with one lead. Does that mean we should stop casting one diverse lead if we want to make money?

As we continue, the 31–40% bin earns less than half of the bins on either side of it. Does that mean that films with 3 diverse leads are toxic at the box office and should be avoided in favor of two or four?

Finally, the best-performing bin is the second-most-diverse, not the most diverse. The most diverse bin is the over 50% one, in which the number of markets and films, and the box office, all go down. Is this arguing that we should never make films with more than four diverse leads?

How do the most diverse films perform, ones with all BIPOC cast? We don’t know, because all numbers over 50% are sandwiched together.

This is all indicative of randomness and flawed methodology, not any sort of pattern. If diverse leads meant more box office, we would expect to see the numbers trend consistently upwards, not go on a drunkard’s walk, stumbling up and down from one category to the next.

Mo' Theaters, Mo’ Money

Figure 3 also reports another variable that receives almost no discussion: mean theater count. The films in the 41-50% bin opened in roughly 3,460 theaters versus roughly 2,580 for the 11-20% bin.

It dips at 11-20%, recovers at 21-30%, then dips again at 31-40%. But every dip in box office is a dip in theater count, in the same place, by the same shape. What looks like noise in the diversity story is actually a clean signal in the distribution story:

mo’ theaters, mo’ money. And of course it is! Theaters are where the money is made.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, theater count is determined before audiences buy tickets and reflects distributor confidence and marketing investment. Once that variable enters the picture, the relationship between cast diversity and box office becomes much harder to disentangle.

Having diverse casts thus does not necessarily directly cause a movie to have a bigger budget, release in more theaters, and make more money. It may be the other way around: having bigger budgets that release in more theaters means casts are more likely to be larger and more diverse.

Elsewhere, the report observes that white moviegoers made up the largest audience share for biographies, documentaries and dramas — and that those same three genres posted the lowest median box office.

This is the only time in the entire report they use the term “coincidentally.” Everywhere else, two things moving alongside each other is presented as straight evidence. Diverse casts and high box office share a bin, and that “demonstrates” the thesis. White audiences and low box office share three genres, and that’s, coincidentally, worth mentioning.

The hedge is right. Biographies, documentaries and dramas are cheap films that don’t generally open in 3,400 theaters. But does anyone really think cheap documentaries and expensive sci-fi films get the same distribution?

Even worse, it’s the same objection that sinks their cast-diversity finding; correlation is not causation. UCLA sees the confound when it wants to. Just not in the direction that hurts their thesis.

Table 5 is a Mess

Remember the horror problem from the top of this piece? Here’s where it lives:

Table 5 (p. 43) reports median global box office and audience demographics across ten genres. This undermines the report’s thesis in multiple ways.

First, the horror paradox. Horror draws the highest Black and Latinx audience share of any genre (15.7% and 29.1%), and posts the lowest white share (46.5%). Per Table 1, it also has the highest ROI in the study, at 2.6. And per Figure 2, 63.6% of horror films fall at or below the 30% BIPOC cast threshold — the third-worst share of any genre, after fantasy and drama.

So the audiences UCLA says are least represented on screen turn out most heavily for one of the genres that casts them least — and that genre returns more per dollar than any other in the study. This finding is never discussed, but it could point to an obvious conclusion: Black and Latino audiences care more about genre than cast diversity.

But it gets stranger. The genre with almost exactly the same Latinx audience share is animation, at 29.0% against horror’s 29.1% — UCLA highlights both in yellow. Yet animation sits near the top of their cast-diversity ranking while horror sits near the bottom. Two genres at opposite ends of the diversity scale, drawing an identical Latino audience.

And animation’s diversity score comes from voice casting. So the genre that ties horror on Latino turnout only registers as diverse because of who voices the talking animals — which I spent half a section arguing tells you nothing about audience preference for on-screen diversity. Foxes and bunnies don't have a race, but they apparently have a BIPOC cast share.

Second, look at the sample sizes. Documentary: two films. Sci-Fi: four. Fantasy: four. Horror has twenty-two, more than these other three genres combined. The table presents all ten in identical rows conveying identical authority.

The report also prints a median for just two documentary films, then labels it the top white genre. And Sci-Fi’s $505.7M — the largest figure in the table by a factor of four and a half, has just four titles.

Also, why are we even including documentaries alongside fiction films? Documentaries don’t “cast” actors in the same way, they use real people.

Finally, the Zoe Saldaña problem also applies to genres. The N column sums to 109 — every film in the study, each assigned to exactly one genre. But films are rarely one genre.

Sinners’ own IMDb page classifies it as horror and a period drama. The Conjuring: Last Rites’ IMDb page categorizes it as horror, mystery and thriller. Where does a horror-comedy go? A sci-fi action film? The report never says how genre was assigned, by whom, or what happens to a mixed-genre film.

Robustness

So what would a good study look like? Good social science asks whether the results would survive reasonable alternative theories, and which metrics could actually falsify a thesis.

In UCLA’s case, we would want to know if the findings would change if the correlation between diversity and box office were measured using…

• screen time?

• dialogue?

• top five billed actors instead of top eight?

• all speaking roles?

• weighted billing?

• audience surveys?

If audiences truly preferred more diverse casts, we should expect that relationship to survive alternative definitions of diversity, remain after controlling for budget, genre, franchise status, theater count, and marketing, and also appear consistently across years rather than shifting between arbitrary bins.

UCLA never demonstrates any of those things.

Again, there is no published dataset. Race, gender, disability, genre and “underrepresented stories” are all human-coded, by coders not blind to the hypothesis.

The real bottom line is: the study simply doesn’t prove what it says it’s proving. It’s bad science and it’s unfair to diverse people.

A Spiky Academic Jargon Fence

So why do so few people read this study, yet so many cite it?

Like Annenberg, the actual meat and potatoes findings are shielded by a sea of incomprehensible academic jargon, particularly on page 4, which is crammed with findings so abstruse they would make Judith Butler blush.

The last page of headline findings is packed with gems like this one:

Nine people worked on this. I challenge you to make any real meaning out of it. I’ve read it dozens of times now and still don’t really know what it means.

Page 4 is covered in “Highlights” like these, which serve as a spiky jargon fence to ward off general readers, journalists and, probably, everyone else except for your humble Gadfly.

But, frankly, with such a poor underlying methodology, much of this is just dense, fashionable nonsense, a term coined by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to define the uncritical use of pretentious scientific or mathematical jargon to give philosophical weight to the humanities and social sciences.

Unfortunately, the UCLA Report is just a diversity hypothesis, dressed up in fashionable nonsense, posing as a rigorous academic study.

One Final Issue

Looking back through previous years’ studies, UCLA simply repeats the same headline claim over and over, strengthening the language every year as the “new” evidence deteriorates.

2025: “further demonstrates”

2024: “continues to support”

2020: “supports”

2016: “suggests.”

It seems like, instead of fixing their methodology, they simply updated the strength of their conviction.

What USC and UCLA’s Studies Both Get Wrong

As promised, UCLA also shares many flaws with USC’s study. Here is a quick summary of the main flaws the two studies share:

1. By focusing on the top 100 films, the studies implicitly assume that blockbuster directing is the highest order of filmmaking success, and equally desirable to all filmmakers. They conflate representation in elite studio tentpoles with representation in filmmaking generally, without proving that equal numbers of people from underrepresented groups are pursuing them.

2. The reports measure demographic outcomes, but repeatedly interpret them as evidence about opportunity, discrimination, and audience demand without establishing the causal links required to support those conclusions.

3. The studies confuse noise for signal, using tiny sample sizes that create dramatic-looking swings. UCLA announces diverse candidates “lost ground” in 2025, but the numbers are so small that a swing tells you almost nothing. If there are 8 diverse films one year, and 10 the next, that’s noise, not a trend.

4. The studies confuse stock and flow. The population of top-grossing directors is a stock — a standing pool of incumbents who sit on their thrones for decades. The directors newly entering that first time blockbuster tier each year are the flow — and in an industry this competitive, the flow is a trickle.

   

5. The report examines the top-grossing theatrical films of a single year (2025). But directors, writers and actors are hired years before release. A director appearing in 2025 may have been hired in 2022 or even earlier. We thus can’t reliably use the current year as a metric of progress.

For more on Annenberg’s issues, you can read my piece The Annenberg Ouroboros.

Diversity Deserves Better

The central irony of the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report is that it asks two important questions:

1. How diverse are the casts of the world’s top films?

2. Do diverse films outperform at the box office?

It then designs tools that are far too blunt to answer them.

As the UCLA Report has become one of the industry’s most cited pieces of research, a critique of its methodology and findings is essential.

If UCLA’s choices are arbitrary, insufficiently justified, and unable to distinguish correlation from causation, then the report risks creating confidence where there should be none. And that does a disservice to diverse creatives.

This study has received $1.75 million in government funding. That grant money could have gone to better scholarship. Period.

The case for diversity will not advance until we have better studies and data supporting it. And studies this bad reflect poorly on Hollywood diversity research in general.

If the goal is to persuade Hollywood to change, we need to understand how and why far better than these broken studies allow us to.

In the interest of doing that, and creating something constructive, I have asked Stephen Follows to conduct a follow up study of what the data actually supports in terms of diversity and the box office. I will link to his piece here when he releases it.

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“There was this sense of a great black hope, if you will, that would hopefully correct this continued perceived snub of minorities in Hollywood.”

- Justin Chang, Complex

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At the end of 2016, rising activist April Reign, creator of the iconic hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor. She had been a lawyer for the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for fifteen years, but left her job in 2014 because she was in need of a change.

“I was in a very comfortable place,” she recalls. “The money was good, and the job wasn’t difficult. But I wasn’t feeling creative, and there wasn’t any passion in my work… And I said, ‘I want to do something different.’”

The CSM, like every other mainstream media outlet, took Reign’s story at face value. But the truth behind #OscarsSoWhite is far more complicated.

This is a story of the activism, publicity, and unintended consequences that shook the foundations of Hollywood. And it all began with a series of tweets.

But no, not the ones you’re thinking of. Not yet.

Tweeting Herself Out of a Job

April Reign was born April Juanita Sands in Newark, New Jersey. After attending undergrad and law school at the University of Texas, she worked as a supervisor for the FEC’s enforcement division. But her true love was Twitter.

This was the golden age of Black Twitter, and Reign was an early power user on her “Reignofapril” account. From 2010-2014, Sands sent more than 232,000 tweets. That’s 160 tweets a day, every day, for four years.

But it turned out there was a serious problem: Reign had been using her work computer to send many of her most inflammatory, partisan tweets, and during work hours no less.

Reign wasn’t just any federal employee; she worked for the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division, specifically charged with investigating "alleged violations of the law" and making recommendations to the FEC about "appropriate action to take with respect to apparent violations."

An FEC attorney who was still employed by the agency at the time told the Daily Mail that Sands was known in the agency as ‘the most enthusiastic pro-Obama lawyer we had.’

‘Everyone called her Obama girl,’ said the lawyer, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record. ‘She probably didn’t worry about seeming too rah-rah and running afoul of the law,’ he added, ‘because she bragged to anyone who would listen that the Obama 2012 campaign was going to hire her away from the FEC.’

As the House Oversight Committee’s Investigation showed, tweets like the one above were in violation of The Hatch Act, a federal law that makes it a crime for a federal employee to “solicit or receive a donation of money or other thing of value in connection with a Federal, State, or local election, while in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties.”

A conviction can result in a $5,000 fine and up to three years in prison.

As a part of a settlement agreement with the [Office of Special Counsel], Ms. Sands admitted to violating the Hatch Act by soliciting political contributions via Twitter, conducting political activity through her Twitter account, and participating in a political discussion ‘via webcam from an FEC conference room . . . while on duty.’

According to the investigation, Sands' computer hard drive was recycled, and its records wiped, before the FEC's Inspector General could access it.

"The FEC's failure to retain Ms. Sands' hard drive prevented the FEC (Office of Inspector General) from fully pursuing appropriate criminal sanctions for Ms. Sands' admitted violations of federal law," Representative Jim Jordan (R, Ohio) wrote.

Still, Sands was forced to resign in April of 2014, and barred from federal employment for two years. She continued tweeting through May and June, commenting on Obama and the BET Awards (awards shows were her biggest passion).

It was only after receiving questions from the Daily Mail that she made her tweets private in mid-July.

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Bad Day at Banana Republic

Barry Jenkins was broke. His first feature Medicine for Melancholy, made for just $15,000, had been an indie success, premiering at SXSW, playing Toronto, and been nominated for Gotham and Indie Spirit Awards. But, like its mumblecore predecessors, the film was not a financial hit, grossing just $111,551 at the box office.

While Jenkins landed an agent at CAA and a deal with Focus Features, he still had to pay rent. And that meant continuing his job as a shipment supervisor at Banana Republic. For years, he would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to be at work by 5:30 a.m., he told Filmmaker Magazine.

Jenkins grew up in Miami, in the most hardscrabble circumstances imaginable. His mother, a nurse, was addicted to crack. He was eventually taken in by a surrogate grandmother figure, and escaped the projects through football, playing for a Liberty City team that included seven future NFL players. It landed him an academic scholarship to Florida State, where he eventually discovered the film school.

After the modest success of his first feature, Jenkins then spent a long time trying to get an adaptation of Bill Clegg’s junkie memoir off the ground (his Focus deal), while also directing short films. Eventually Jenkins partnered with Tarell Alvin McCraney, also from Liberty City, on an adaptation of McCraney’s unproduced play called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

It was now 2013. Financing for Moonlight was not going well, and it had already been five years since Medicine for Melancholy was released, when Jenkins was invited to moderate a panel at Telluride, where he had worked his way up from a volunteer, cleaning movie theaters after festival screenings.

That fateful panel was a Q+A with Brad Pitt and Steve McQueen for their new film 12 Years a Slave. Jenkins’s hosting duties resulted in what he called “the sweetest ambush” – an invitation to dinner and an offer from Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, to produce Moonlight.

Moonlight’s IMDb logline: “A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood.” The film was a poetic, nuanced, art-housey story, the kind that makes critics and festival programmers salivate, but rarely moves general audiences.

Jenkins was of course aware of his arthouse lineage. In a BFI Portrait he cited his influences: Claire Denis, Oshima Nagisa, Wong Kar Wai, Carlos Reygadas, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Charles Burnett, the only American on his list.

Wrestling His Way Up

Nate Parker also had a troubled upbringing. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia to a 17 year old single mother. His mother eventually remarried, and her second husband created enough trouble for Parker that he moved in with his maternal uncle at 14.

His uncle was a former wrestler, who encouraged him to join the sport. His talent soon took him to Penn State. He became an All-American, placing fifth in the 2002 NCAA championships, and graduating with a degree in computer programming.

After college, a Hollywood manager discovered him while he was working as a computer programmer, then urged him to move to Los Angeles. Parker soon got his first acting gigs, including supporting roles in films like George Lucas’s Red Tails.

At the same time, Parker was directing short films, and developing his dream project, a film based on the life of Nat Turner, the leader of an infamous 1831 slave rebellion which resulted in the death of 55 whites. After the two day rebellion, Turner was captured, tried and executed. Parker chose the title The Birth of a Nation in direct response to D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist film.

A few days after he finished shooting the R&B romance Beyond the Lights in late 2013, Parker decided it was time to make his Nat Turner movie. He told his agents he would stop acting until he could play the role he was born to play. Parker was so determined he put up $100,000 of his own money to get the film going.

He began raising money, first from NBA players Michael Finley and Tony Parker, as well as NFL linebacker Derrick Brooks, and Hollywood pros like Ed Zwick and David Goyer. Soon he had a $10m budget and a star-studded cast including the (then not disgraced) Armie Hammer and Gabrielle Union.

Parker most often compared his film to 1996 Best Picture Winner Braveheart:

“I reached out to Mel Gibson and he responded. He read my script and he sat with me for three hours and literally gave me a checklist of all that I needed to do. He called me from Australia the day before my battle sequences.”

One would struggle to find two more divergent cinematic influences than Charles Burnett and Braveheart. But they would soon offer radically different paths for the Academy.

All the dominoes were lined up. All they needed was a catalyst, which erupted in the summer of 2014, before either film was even shot.

Ferguson Calling

On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown, an eighteen year old Black man, had stolen a box of Swisher Sweet cigars from a convenience store. He shoved a clerk before fleeing the scene with his friend Dorian Johnson. Brown was soon confronted by law enforcement officer Darren Wilson. After a struggle, Wilson shot the unarmed Brown six times, killing him. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict Wilson. The Department of Justice also declined to bring federal charges.

It sparked a racial reckoning that reshaped America, and Hollywood with it.

Ferguson, it turned out, was a house of horrors for its low income Black community. The local police seemed to be treating them as a sort of municipal bond, loading them with tickets and fines and throwing them in jail in unsanitary conditions when they were unable to pay. As Harper’s reported:

In March [of 2015], the Department of Justice concluded that Ferguson relies on the “enforcement of code provisions” to generate a significant portion of revenue and that the police disproportionately target black residents. African Americans make up 67 percent of the population of Ferguson but receive 90 percent of tickets and face 93 percent of arrests.

Once arrested, the Black citizens of Ferguson were often held in jail for weeks, in insane, Guantanamo-like conditions. They were denied basic toiletries, showers, and feminine hygiene products.

[…] On numerous occasions, guards mocked the women and would shout things like: “You hoes stink” and “You need to wash out your coochies.”

The killing of Michael Brown sparked dozens of protests, and turbocharged the nascent Black Lives Matter movement, initially created in 2013 in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for Trayvon Martin’s shooting.

But it was 2014’s “summer of unrest” that made it a national fixture.

April Reign is Born

That fateful summer of 2014 is when April Sands — unemployed and barred from federal work for two years — became April Reign. The practical effect is a matter of record: a search for April Juanita Sands yields a forced FEC resignation. One for April Reign presents an activist.

She had already been tweeting as @ReignOfApril since 2010. After the resignation, the handle became her identity.

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Seeing the events unfolding in Ferguson, Reign was unable to resist the siren call of social media. She had been off for less than a month the night Michael Brown was killed, when she returned to the medium that doomed her legal career.

Reign soon found a new job — and a new biography. Her public accounts of leaving the FEC, as well as her LinkedIn page, mention no forced resignation, no missing hard drives, no two-year suspension. As she told the Washington Post in 2017:

In 2013, Andrew Shade, a friend of Reign’s from Twitter, needed help with the website he’d just founded, Broadway Black, spotlighting black artists in theater. Reign’s job in campaign finance lacked creativity, she said, so she began to write for the site to feed her passion for the arts and help ease Shade’s workload. She eventually left law and became Broadway Black’s managing editor.

It was pretty small time stuff, but Reign’s social media addiction was soon to yield some very unexpected results.

A Hollywood Powder Keg

As the summer of unrest continued, Hollywood seemed to have been making racial progress.

2014’s Best Picture winner was Steve McQueen’s harrowing 12 Years A Slave. That year there were also three Black acting nominees: Lupita Nyong’o, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Barkhad Abdi. Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress, and Steve McQueen became the first Black man to direct a Best Picture winner. 12 Years was also a box office success, grossing $187m on a $20m budget.

In the 20th century, Black representation in the acting categories had been dismal, with just five competitive acting wins across the Academy’s first 71 ceremonies. Only one Black actor had ever won Best Actor, Sidney Poitier, for 1964’s Lilies of the Field. At the end of the 20th century, no Black woman had ever won Best Actress.

The remaining four winners — Louis Gossett Jr. (1983’s An Officer and a Gentleman), Hattie McDaniel (1940’s Gone With the Wind), Denzel Washington (1990’s Glory) and Whoopi Goldberg (1991’s Ghost) — all came in the supporting categories. Entire decades passed — the 1950s, the 1970s — without a single Black winner.

Hattie McDaniel, the first Black Oscar winner ever in 1940, sat at a segregated table against the back wall. She died in 1952 without seeing another Black actor win.

The nominees told a similar story: across the Academy’s first 71 ceremonies, only 35 Black actors had received acting nominations, accounting for just 55 nominations in total.

In 1996, People Magazine started a scandal when they discovered that, out of the 166 Oscar Nominees that year, only one short film director, Dianne Houston, was Black. Protests were planned outside the awards.

But the 21st century brought several milestones in quick succession:

In 2002, Denzel Washington won Best Actor, 38 years after Poitier, for Training Day. Halle Berry also made Oscar history, becoming the first Black woman to win Best Actress for Monster’s Ball.

2005: Jamie Foxx wins Best Actor for Ray, Morgan Freeman wins Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby. Four Black acting nominations total.

2007: Forest Whitaker wins Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland, Jennifer Hudson wins Best Supporting Actress for Dreamgirls; five Black acting nominees.

2010: Mo’Nique wins Best Supporting Actress, and Geoffrey Fletcher becomes the first Black winner of a screenplay Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Precious.

2013: Quvenzhanè Wallis becomes the youngest person ever nominated for Best Actress for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

2014, the year of 12 Years A Slave, was arguably the peak:

• 1st Best Picture winner directed and produced by a Black filmmaker.

• 2nd Black writer to win Best Screenplay (John Ridley).

• Black Supporting Actress winner (Lupita Nyong’o).

• 1st Black female Academy president (Cheryl Boone Isaacs).

• 1st Mexican filmmaker to win Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón).

The Academy was still overwhelmingly white, but the first 15 ceremonies of the 21st century produced nearly twice as many competitive acting wins for Black actors (9) as the previous 71 ceremonies combined (5).

Perhaps this recent track record would be enough to shield Hollywood from the coming storm?

95,000 Tweets an Hour

As the 2015 Oscars were announced on the morning of January 15th, Reign was ready. She’d always been an eager awards show tweeter, and this was the biggest one of them all. When all twenty acting nominations went to white performers, she was surprised and upset, and her famous hashtag was born.

The hashtag went viral, with 95,000 tweets per hour. Mainstream outlets like The Huffington Post would soon join the bandwagon, and even late night host Jimmy Fallon tweeted:

But were the 2015 Oscars #SoWhite? Before 2015, the last time the Oscars had produced an all-white acting nominee list was 17 years prior, in 1998, as Vox reported.

While there is a structural argument to be made for how not enough Black films were being produced, the reality is that only completed films with real studios and massive marketing budgets get nominated for Oscars. There is a very finite supply of these films, especially Black-led ones, and Oscar campaigns are a world just as ruthless and expensive as any national political campaign.

As we are about to see, with such a limited supply, any single stroke of bad luck can prove catastrophic, especially under severe activist pressure.

So what options were actually available to the Academy in 2015?

A Blood Sport: How People Actually Win Oscars

The path to winning Best Actor (or any) Oscar is beset with a gauntlet of prior awards, which serve as a sort of prestige obstacle course. Alfonso Cuarón, winner of two directing Oscars, famously called campaigning “vicious.”

It’s a seven month process, often longer, no different from a political campaign, with all the attendant mud-slinging.

A 2023 New York Times Magazine piece referred to it as a “blood sport,” and “cutthroat:”

Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition.

Here’s how it works for a lot of movies:

On top of the massive time investment, it’s obviously very expensive. Neon spent $18m campaigning for Anora’s Best Picture win, 3x the budget of the actual film, which included ads, Q&A screenings, as well as the all-important DVD screeners for those who couldn’t see it in theaters.

Celebrities fight over these trophies like a pack of rabid dogs over an Oscar Mayer wiener. Recent campaigns have yielded some true gems like this one:

All this is to say that you need a metric fuckton of money, time and bloodlust to even campaign for an Oscar, let alone win. The Times again:

The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. “Phase 2 is all about honing your narrative and defining yourself in the race.”

In a sense, the Oscars are the grand prix of publicists, and often have little to do with the actual films. The modern Oscar campaign, we must remember, was created by none other than Harvey Weinstein, who infamously beat Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan with his no-holds-barred campaign for Shakespeare in Love.

Ava DuVernay, whose 2015 Selma “snub” was Reign’s catalyst to create #OscarsSoWhite, would prove integral to the changing Academy. DuVernay had a secret weapon for Oscar season: she was a trained publicist. From her Wikipedia page:

She opened her own public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency, also known as DVAPR, in 1999. Through DVAPR she provided marketing and PR services to the entertainment and lifestyle industry, working on campaigns for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls.

For DuVernay, whose Selma campaign was already hobbled by its rushed postproduction, Reign’s hashtag arrived at a fortuitous moment.

Because if Hollywood publicity was Blood Sport, DuVernay was its new Jean Claude Van Damme. As a publicist, she had helped guide Jennifer Hudson to her Oscar for Dreamgirls, perhaps she could do the same for her own film.

The Missed Screener Deadline that Sparked a Movement

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the 2015 slate for performers of color: Gugu Mbatha-Raw had the critics' darling double (Belle, Beyond the Lights), but Relativity Media was sliding towards its first bankruptcy and spent nothing campaigning for her; Chadwick Boseman's James Brown was a summer (i.e. non-Oscar) release Universal never campaigned for; Top Five was a comedy, which rarely gets Oscar attention; Dear White People was also a comedy, and had a microdistributor incapable of funding an Oscar run.

The problem wasn’t that voters ignored ten worthy Black actors, with solid campaigns behind them, it's that the studios only produced approximately two nominatable performances: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who had no money behind her, and David Oyelowo, who did.

But one of them missed a crucial deadline.

The film that had the strongest potential for Oscar noms was Ava DuVernay’s Selma, which received an A+ Cinemascore from audiences. An MLK biopic was the perfect Oscar bait, and Paramount knew it, especially as the summer of unrest continued.

In a painful irony, Paramount moved up Selma’s release date from MLK day to Christmas because they felt the film had a real shot at Oscar glory, as DuVernay said herself. Via Flavorwire:

Director Ava DuVernay told me the film wasn’t initially intended for release this fall; Paramount proposed its Christmas date in mid-June, three weeks into shooting, after getting a look at the impressive dailies. In most circumstances, the window between a film’s shoot and its arrival in theaters is something like a year. But DuVernay met Paramount’s challenge, recognizing the urgency of getting a movie into theaters that is so very much of its moment, and rushed the picture through post-production. As a result, its initial guild and critics’ screenings didn’t even show the final, locked film.

According to Variety, DuVernay locked Selma on November 26th; it usually takes six weeks to master, press, and deliver discs for voters. Paramount, the film’s distributor, paid extra for expedited service, and had to pick and choose which organizations to send them to, as several deadlines had already passed by the time those screeners went out on December 18 (by which time many potential voters were presumably gone for the holidays).

The people who didn’t get screeners included the crucial SAG nominating committee. Selma was thus shut out of every SAG category, an essential pipeline to the Oscars. The Directors Guild also, without screeners, passed on nominating Selma.

Reign, through #OscarsSoWhite, blamed racism for Oyelowo’s lack of a nomination, but Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street was also shut out of the prior year’s SAG noms for not getting the screeners in time. American Sniper did get its screeners out, and Bradley Cooper took the fifth Actor slot, which may have gone to Oyelowo, if the voters had actually been able to see the film.

In the 21st century, about 80% of the Oscar nominees for director and actor also received their respective SAG and DGA nominations, and virtually all of the winners did, so losing that crucial step was devastating for Selma’s chances.

This is because SAG-AFTRA’s nominating committee and the DGA’s membership overlap substantially with the Academy’s actors and directors branches. The numbers bear this out: in the entire 21st century, only one film has produced a Best Director or Best Actor win without the corresponding DGA or SAG nomination—Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. Every other winner in both categories cleared the guild bar first.

Even the BAFTAs didn’t get to see the film in time, which their head Amanda Berry addressed directly:

“I’m heartbroken about Selma because the reason it hasn’t got any nominations is because people didn’t see it. The film wasn’t delivered in the States until the end of November, then a print has to be shipped over to the UK and then screenings organised... before the BAFTA voting started there were only three screenings of the film and only hundreds of people were reached - there are 6,500 voting members.”

In the end, Alejandro González Iñárritu won the DGA award for Birdman, and Eddie Redmayne won the SAG award for The Theory of Everything. Both won their eventual Oscar.

In later interviews, including the New York Times’s oral history of #OscarsSoWhite, DuVernay has foregrounded racial bias rather than the campaign’s timing. She may well believe it — a Black director watching a white-dominated industry pass over her film had every reason to suspect bias was in the mix. But the timing problem is the part that keeps dropping out of the retelling, and it’s the part that actually explains which bodies shut Selma out: the exact guilds that never got the discs.

In Elite Capture, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes how “political projects can be hijacked by the well positioned and well resourced.” The Selma premiere protest was real — Ferguson was ongoing, Eric Garner had been killed seven months earlier in July, and police violence was the film’s subject.

But look at it more carefully: the cast and crew of a $20m movie, at their own New York premiere, hands raised in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose — a prepared, posed photograph, in matching t-shirts, while launching an Oscar campaign. A protest and a photo op, all in one. Masterful.

Years later, Oyelowo claimed — and DuVernay endorsed — that the snub was retaliation for the protest, again with no mention of the screener timing.

“It’s part of why that film didn’t get everything that people think it should’ve got and it birthed #OscarsSoWhite,” continued Oyelowo. “They used their privilege to deny a film on the basis of what they valued in the world.” via Screen Daily.

The Academy even apologized:

But let’s look at it all again: the Oscar voters who were able to see Selma in time — including the Hollywood Foreign Press, who attended its AFI premiere — nominated it: Best Drama, Best Actor for Oyelowo, and a Best Director nod that made DuVernay the first Black woman director ever nominated at the Golden Globes. The only group Paramount did manage to get screeners to in time was the Academy, which in turn nominated the film for Best Picture and Best Song. Why would all almost all-white Academy nominate Selma for Best Picture if a substantial bloc of voters wanted to punish the film for the protest?

Best Picture is the only category the entire Academy nominates — and in 2015 that electorate was roughly 6,300 people, 89% of them white. It made Selma one of just eight Best Picture nominees of the year. Under the preferential ballot, that nomination required clearing a threshold of about 10% of first-place votes — several hundred of those overwhelmingly white voters ranking Selma among the very best films they’d seen.

The voting record does not look like a coordinated punishment for the protest. It looks like an awards campaign that succeeded with voters who saw the film in time and failed with those who didn’t.

The movement that remade the Academy may thus have been set in motion by something far more mundane than #OscarsSoWhite suggested: a missed screener deadline.

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The 2015 Oscars Ceremony

The host of the 2015 ceremony, Neil Patrick Harris, acknowledged the controversy immediately, opening his speech with a memorable quip:

The "best and whitest" Oscars gave Best Picture and Best Director to Alejandro González Iñárritu, in the middle of an unprecedented Mexican three-peat — Cuarón, then Iñárritu twice in directing, while Emmanuel Lubezki won three consecutive cinematography Oscars. These were all Mexican-born filmmakers behind the camera.

#OscarsSoWhite quietly defined "diversity" as Black American acting nominations, which erased both the Latino men sweeping the top of the show and the group with the worse statistical grievance. As UCLA’s 2015 Hollywood Diversity Study showed:

Representing nearly 18 percent of the U.S. population in 2014, Latinos were the most underrepresented among the minority groups, by a factor of more than 3 to 1.

So yes, the Oscars were “so white” in 2015, but only if you discount Selma’s tragically flawed campaign, and ignore the historic Latino filmmaker wins.

From #OscarsSoWhite To A2020

Reign had survived her career transition and found a new calling. For the 2015 Oscars, she organized a watching boycott, specifically calling out Selma in Forbes:

The near shutout of “Selma” star David Oyelowo and director Ava DuVernay in the acting and directing categories was not surprising, but frustrating to Reign… “Ava and David also should be recognized for their outstanding contributions.”

Reign’s campaign soon reached the ears of Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first Black female president of the Academy. At the 2015 Governors Awards in November, still smarting from #OscarsSoWhite, Boone Isaacs launched a new Academy initiative called A2020, which focused on improving diversity. As part of these efforts, they invited a record 683 members to the 2016 academy, including Nate Parker.

With #OscarsSoWhite at her back, she would soon transform the Academy forever.

Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars tells the story of how Boone Isaacs worked her way up through publicity, becoming the first Black woman to run a studio marketing department in 1997. Before coming to Hollywood, she had been a flight attendant for Pan Am, traveling the world and expanding on her fascination with what she called “the international concept.” When she was a stewardess, she said “I had my favorite route, which was to Tokyo, to Hong Kong, to Sydney, to either Fiji or Tahiti, to Hawaii, then home.”

Her love for globehopping was to prove fateful.

Jenkins and Parker Move into Production

Slowly but surely, serendipity continued to favor Jenkins. Two years after joining the project, Plan B connected him to upstart indie distributor A24, who came on board to finance Moonlight.

Parker shot first, over 27 days, in May of 2015 in Georgia. His cast and crew struggled with the bleak subject matter, but Parker, drawing on his experience as a wrestling coach, was a fearless leader.

Jenkins shot next, for 25 days starting on October 15th in Miami. With such a late start, Moonlight would not be ready for Sundance, but Parker was.

And boy, would Sundance be ready for him, because in between there was the…

#OscarsSoWhite: 2016 Edition

As the 2016 nominations drew near, Reign was having new problems. A year and a half after her two-year bar from federal work, she was suspended indefinitely from the practice of law:

Her name was also struck from Maryland’s register of attorneys.

Under her new name, Reign poured herself into her activism. She was in luck: if the 2015 Oscars was a misfire, the 2016 nominations started to look like a conspiracy.

On January 14, 2016, all twenty acting slots again went to white performers. This time the resurrected #OscarsSoWhite hashtag went nuclear.

Under the intense scrutiny of #OscarsSoWhite, it was easy for every possible snub to look like it came straight out of a KKK rally. But as we saw with Selma and Birdman, the Oscars have a clear feeder system: the SAG, DGA, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations, among others.

If we’re going to call something a snub, it’s worth checking against that large voting consensus, which directly influences the Oscar noms.

So which performer of color did the guilds anoint, only to see the Academy refuse?

There is only one real name on this list: Idris Elba. Elba’s warlord in Beasts of No Nation swept the feeder system — SAG nomination, Golden Globe nomination, BAFTA nomination — and two weeks after his Oscar snub, he won the SAG award and an Indie Spirit Award.

But, as always, there was an extenuating circumstance; Beasts of No Nation was Netflix’s first original feature film, acquired out of Toronto and released in October 2015 simultaneously in theaters and on streaming. In response, every major theater chain boycotted it. AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Carmike: all refused to book a film that dared violate their sacred ninety-day theatrical window. Beasts thus played a few dozen independent screens and grossed almost nothing theatrically.

While it was viewed over 3 million times in its first week on Netflix, it was largely viewed as a prestige grab for the nascent streamer. Unfortunately, Netflix’s Oscar beachhead also featured the most nominatable Black performance of the year, in what became the most important year for diversity in the Academy’s history.

2016 was the opening salvo of the late 2010s streaming wars. Cannes banned Netflix from competition in 2018; Spielberg would soon argue Netflix films belonged at the Emmys. Beasts didn’t have a late screener problem like Selma; this time the screeners simply went out on a sea of controversy. To many voters at the time, it felt like a vote for Beasts, and thus Netflix, was a vote against movie theaters.

The film’s grim narrative didn’t help either: it included the massacre of the protagonist’s family, the protagonist committing machete atrocities, and a strong implication that he, a child, was sexually abused by Elba’s character. Great storytelling, but quite grim for Oscar fare.

As always, there are counterfactuals: Forest Whitaker did win an Oscar for portraying Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland. Was the Academy not just as white, if not more, back then?

And what about Straight Outta Compton? The N.W.A biopic was the year’s other centerpiece grievance — a cultural phenomenon whose only nomination, in an unbearable irony, went to its screenplay, credited to four white writers.

But no individual Compton performance was nominated by anyone, anywhere, all season. The cast received a SAG ensemble nomination, but the film’s problem wasn’t racial: it was an ensemble of unknowns with no campaignable lead, with a summer release, in a genre the Academy has never respected. And we know it’s the genre, because 8 Mile — acclaimed, enormous, and white — got exactly one Oscar: Best Original Song, and nothing for its cast. The Academy treated the white rap movie and the Black rap movie identically: zero acting nominations. And 8 Mile had clear leads.

Creed is the weakest snub case. Michael B. Jordan received no SAG, Globe, or BAFTA nomination for the role. Sylvester Stallone was the film’s only contender all season and won the Golden Globe. The grievance was really about optics — the white legacy actor as the sole honored element of a Black director’s film about a Black boxer — and they were genuinely uncomfortable. But a Rocky sequel/reboot, the seventh in its line, receiving exactly one nomination, for Rocky himself, is the single most predictable outcome in the Academy’s repertoire.

None of this is to say that Hollywood doesn’t have a serious pipeline problem. I’ve written extensively about this here and here.

But measuring social justice by the Oscar winners is a bit like judging the education system by who becomes a Rhodes Scholar. The real sorting happened years earlier, basically from birth. The struggle itself mostly benefits elites, who as we’ve seen, will crawl over dead bodies for any possible advantage come Oscar season.

And in classic Hollywood fashion, 2016’s activism was also conveniently self-serving. This time, Reign’s campaign was adopted by a fresh group of snubbed celebrities.

The 2016 Boycott

At the Academy’s Oscar luncheon that February, Boone Isaacs faced a room that included Eddie Redmayne, Matt Damon, and Alicia Vikander. Over plates of arctic char, she told them: “This year, we all know there’s an elephant in the room. I have asked the elephant to leave.”

The elephant refused. Chris Rock, host of the 2016 Oscars, came out swinging.

“Welcome to the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.”

By this point a full-on celebrity boycott was underway, with Reign right behind them.

With the resurrection of #OscarsSoWhite, Reign found her true moment in the sun, taking part in a media blitz that dwarfed the attention she received in 2015. She took full advantage to make some unique recommendations:

Reign and Hollywood also had a new #idea: anti-whiteout protests.

DuVernay and Oyelowo have been spoken of extensively, but Will and Jada Pinkett Smith also served their interests through the boycott. Will Smith’s Concussion was a critically rotten December drama that garnered only a Globe nomination (your author actually enjoyed it). But Smith’s “snub” became the protest’s public face because the boycott was launched by his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

Chris Rock said as much onstage:

“Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!”

Of course, once again, nobody actually cared about the Latino snubs or victories. Benicio Del Toro had a BAFTA supporting nomination for Sicario and was ignored. Iñárritu won Best Director for the second consecutive year, and Emmanuel Lubezki won his third straight cinematography Oscar with little fanfare.

The protest’s definition of “diversity” remained the most self-serving one you could find: Black American acting nominations. This is in keeping with the amorphous BIPOC term; when push comes to shove, BIPOC or “people of color” invariably means the thing that advances me, my group.

Of course, saner voices occasionally emerged.

In January 2016, The Economist crunched the numbers and found that since 2000, Black actors had received 10% of all acting nominations and taken home 15% of the wins, against a 12.6% share of the US population.

They were by far the most nominated minority group, in spite of being smaller than Latinos, and once nominated, they were significantly more likely to win.

If the Academy voters’ antiblack bias was the problem, the data didn’t show it.

A Brief Statistical Detour

Before we continue, it’s worth asking whether the basic statistical premise of #OscarsSoWhite held up through a simple question:

How often should an all-white acting slate have happened back then by chance alone? The math isn’t complicated. There are twenty acting slots per year. With minimal representation of Latinos and Asians, if each goes to a Black performer at the rate The Economist measured — 10% of all nominations since 2000 — then the odds of an all-white year are about 12%, or roughly once a decade.

Use Black actors’ share of leading roles instead — 9%, and it rises to about 15%, or once every seven years or so. The 21st century record obliges: all-white slates in 2015 and 2016 — two in two decades — are consistent with a random, lumpy process, not a conspiracy.

Remove just one nominatable Black film — say, by missing a screener deadline — and the whole year’s representation can vanish with it. Reign read the 2015 slate as a verdict on the voters who, it must be said again, were overwhelmingly white. It was closer to statistical noise.

The bias reading requires the voters to be the problem. But look at what brackets these two years. 2014 was a historic Black showing — 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, Lupita Nyong’o, John Ridley. 2017 was the most diverse year in the Academy’s history — six Black acting nominees, a presence in every category, Moonlight taking Best Picture. The two all-white slates sit wedged between the two best Black years the Oscars had ever produced, delivered by the same electorate. Of course, one could argue the 2017 nominations were themselves influenced by the activism — but the films were still there to be nominated.

A persistent antiblack bias cannot switch on in 2015, deepen in 2016, and switch off in 2017. What changed wasn’t the voters; it was the films.

And what a profoundly unfortunate roll of the dice for an all-white slate to happen in two consecutive years, transforming the Academy forever.

Never Again #OscarsSoWhite: The Academy Responds

The backlash to the 2016 Oscars was swift. While the Academy was still largely white and male, (89% and 73% respectively), it had already made significant progress since 2012, when an LA Times study showed that it was 94% white and 77% male.

But this gradual, somewhat organic progress was not enough.

At an emergency meeting a week [after the 2016 nominations], [Dawn] Hudson, Boone Isaacs and the Academy’s board of governors approved ambitious targets for a membership initiative known as A2020, aiming to double the number of women and ethnically underrepresented members in four years.

Big changes were coming. Soon a film emerged that was going to save Hollywood from the hashtag. Just a week after Boone Isaacs released her apology, the great Black hope for Hollywood finally premiered at Sundance: Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation.

The Birth of a Nation Runs Riot at Sundance

As Owen Gleiberman wrote of Birth’s Sundance premiere…

Over the years, I have seen many standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival. But this past January, at the gigantic Eccles Theatre in Park City, I watched the only standing ovation I have ever experienced — anywhere — that took place before the film it was applauding even began. That film was Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation.”

To say that The Birth of a Nation received a rapturous response at Sundance was an understatement. The film walked away with the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize, and sparked an acquisition showdown that Deadline called “one of the most freewheeling all-night bidding battles ever seen here in Park City.”

Sony Pictures and The Weinstein Company bid in the mid-eight figures for Birth Of A Nation, and Netflix went all out and bid $20 million, sources said.

Parker ultimately opted for a $17.5m distribution deal from Fox Searchlight, making it the largest deal in Sundance history. He chose them in part because they were behind 12 Years A Slave’s Best Picture win, which many thought was a realistic goal.

No matter what, 2017 was not going to be another #OscarsSoWhite.

Meanwhile, the much-smaller Moonlight was quietly completing postproduction. The films would finally meet at the Toronto Film Festival.

But before that, a nuclear-level press disaster was brewing.

A Publicist’s Worst Nightmare

After winning the bidding war at Sundance, Fox Searchlight began preparing for its Oscar campaign. But its due diligence unearthed a troubling fact.

In 1999, when Nate Parker and his Birth cowriter Jean Celestin were student wrestlers at Penn State, they had been charged with sexually assaulting an eighteen year old woman after a night of drinking.

Parker was suspended from the Penn State wrestling team and later transferred to Oklahoma. He was acquitted in a 2001 trial, while Celestin was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. The woman later sued Penn State under Title IX, alleging that the university failed to protect her from harassment by Parker, Celestin, and their supporters following the case. The suit was settled, and Celestin’s conviction was later overturned on procedural grounds; prosecutors declined to retry him after the complainant said she could not endure a second trial.

Parker and Searchlight decided to get ahead of the situation before the film’s all-important Toronto premiere, with two interviews with Variety and Deadline on August 12th. Parker maintained that the case had been resolved and declined to apologize, a stance that would soon become disastrous for the campaign.

But the shitstorm was just beginning. Four days later Variety reported that the woman who accused Parker and Celestin had committed suicide in 2012. She had also previously attempted suicide twice after the reported rape. Her death certificate stated that she suffered from “PTSD due to physical and sexual abuse.”

Parker had been promoting the film with Spike Lee at Martha’s Vineyard, and was shocked to hear of his accuser’s death. He released a long statement on Facebook.

“I cannot change what has happened. I cannot bring this young woman who was someone else’s daughter, someone’s sister and someone’s mother back to life.”

The victim’s family began speaking publicly, intensifying scrutiny of Parker just weeks before Toronto.

“These guys (Parker and Celestin) sucked the soul and life out of her,” her sister said.

Critics also noted the uncomfortable irony that Parker had written a fictional rape into The Birth of a Nation as the catalyst for Nat Turner’s rebellion. Soon Gabrielle Union, his own star, a survivor herself, published an op-ed in the LA Times:

Reviews became inseparable from the scandal. A.O. Scott’s NYTimes review placed the film between a “can’t see” and a “must see,” and compared Parker to Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and other tainted directors. AFI cancelled a planned screening. Critics openly debated whether audiences should separate the artist from the work, and the Oscar campaign collapsed.

Searchlight hired crisis PR specialists, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, Parker repeatedly reverted to insisting he had nothing to apologize for. As he said in an October 2nd 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper:

By the time it was released, Birth of A Nation was dead on arrival, grossing just $16.8m, less than the $17.5m Fox Searchlight paid to acquire it out of Sundance.

The 2017 Oscars are Finally Not So White

As Nate Parker’s horrible August was ending, another movie had a surprise premiere at Telluride on September 2nd: Moonlight. Jenkins had made the impossible leap from volunteer to director.

And soon, the baton of the great Black hope was passed to Moonlight. The two films both played at Toronto, Parker to frustrating questions about his past, and Moonlight to rapturous applause.

The Times’s A.O. Scott saw it at Telluride, which led to his ebullient review.

When the 2017 Oscar nominees were announced, they were finally no longer so white:

The 2017 nominations shattered multiple records for Black representation. Six Black actors were nominated, and seven nonwhite actors overall, tying 2007’s mark. It was the first year Black actors appeared in every acting category, and the first time a single category (Best Supporting Actress) contained three Black nominees. Viola Davis set a new record for acting nominations by a Black actress, while Denzel Washington extended his own record with his seventh.

Behind the camera, Joi McMillon became the first Black woman ever nominated for editing, Bradford Young only the second Black cinematography nominee. Three Black writers (Jenkins, McCraney, and August Wilson) landed screenplay nods in the same year for the first time, and Barry Jenkins became the first Black filmmaker nominated for directing, picture, and screenplay simultaneously.

This was directly attributed to the Academy’s diversified voting pool; 683 new members had already been added since the previous year, over double the prior year’s cohort. But it must be said that the voting bloc was still overwhelmingly white and male, and with the right films available, they seemed to get the message.

While it was an unprecedented victory for the Black community, the Latinos were now largely shut out:

“Latinos are outraged, our actors are not getting the opportunities to work in front of camera, and with few exceptions, in back of camera as well.” Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, said.

Latino frustrations aside, Moonlight quickly became a favored contender, winning the Golden Globe, and sweeping the Gothams and Indie Spirits. Mahershala Ali won the SAG award. While Jenkins lost the DGA award to top rival Damien Chazelle with La La Land, he was still nominated, a crucial step toward his Oscar directing nom.

Soon Jenkins was onstage after the famous Oscar gaffe, in which the announcers accidentally read La La Land instead of Moonlight for Best Picture. The film also won Best Adapted Screenplay. Elsewhere, Viola Davis won Best Supporting Actress for Fences.

It was a quintessential American story: Jenkins had gone from Banana Republic shipping supervisor to Oscar winner in less than a decade.

It was also a unique outcome in Academy history: Moonlight was by far the lowest budgeted film of the modern era to win Best Picture, and it seems unlikely that it ever would have, if not for the twin forces of #OscarsSoWhite, as well as the implosion of The Birth of a Nation at nearly the exact time it was premiering.

Ryan Gosling had perhaps the best reaction of the night:

He claimed he was relieved it wasn’t a medical emergency.

The Great Dilution Begins

One year prior to the 2017 debacle, Academy President Boone Isaacs took the stage at the 2016 Oscars to give a speech.

By the time she spoke these words, action was already underway: five weeks earlier, in January 2016, the board had committed to doubling the number of women and members from underrepresented communities in the Academy by 2020.

DuVernay tweeted in response; “shame is a helluva motivator.”

Boone Isaacs, as she wrote in her letter, was trying the same strategy used in the late 1960s, when Gregory Peck, then Academy President, enacted “The Peck Purge:”

Four days after the Oscars, the Academy announced that it had “revised and democratized” its rolls by reclassifying three hundred and thirty-five of its members as non-voting “associates.” As one headline put it, “Stodgy Old Oscar Gets a Facelift.” Ironically, many in the same voting body that had just awarded “Midnight Cowboy” Best Picture were being told that they were obsolete.

In a strange historical echo, the same body that had just awarded Moonlight had also been labeled obsolete.

Boone Isaacs’s first lever was to try and thin the old guard’s voting rolls: the January package stripped voting status from members who had been inactive in the industry for a decade — a rule critics immediately called age discrimination, sparking a backlash.

Peck suffered through a similar silver-backlash in 1970, but he didn’t back down, reinstating only thirteen of the 335 demoted associates’ voting privileges. Boone Isaacs, however, did ultimately back down, and less than 1% of the Academy lost their voting privileges.

Unable to forcibly retire the old, Boone Isaacs decided instead to dilute them. But there was a problem: a strict cap on the number of Academy invitees:

A maximum of 211 new members could have been invited for 2011, according to membership policies. However, several branch committees endorsed fewer candidates than allotted. A candidate must be sponsored by at least two members of the branch for which the person may qualify. Voting membership has remained at just under 6,000 members since 2003.

On paper, most branches' minimum credit requirements theoretically survived Boone Isaacs’s Great Dilution. But just look at the raw numbers:

The Academy went from roughly 6,000 members in 2015 to a projected 11,319 in 2026 — roughly doubling in a single decade.

The directors branch, which generally required two directorial credits, welcomed filmmakers with a single celebrated feature, Marielle Heller — invited in 2016 with only The Diary of a Teenage Girl to her name — among them.

To hit the numbers, filmography depth was out, festival prestige was in. As I wrote in Film Festivals vs Activists, that same prestige metric, like the Sundance laurel, had already been reengineered in 2014 to select for identity.

In the new waves of invites, the Academy also waved in the arthouse eminences the old club had ignored for decades, including Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach in 2016. With them not only the membership, but also the purpose, of the Academy changed. Kiarostami and Loach were masters, for sure, but neither of them were popular filmmakers. Loach, for one, is an ardent socialist who has spent fifty years making films decrying everything a capitalist studio stands for (your author loves him by the way, watch Kes).

He’s also a white man. How was inviting him supposed to diversify the Academy?

Nobody could object to a single name. But an electorate that joined via Sundance Competition and Un Certain Regard does not vote like the one that broke in sweating through crappy genre pictures on the Warners lot. The old Academy had its activist streak — it famously handed The Hurt Locker the crown over Avatar back in 2010 — but that was a fluke at the time, perhaps even a jealous “fuck you” to the massively successful Cameron by handing his ex wife the gold.

Bigelow was also, of course, the first woman to win Best Director, which matters, even if it’s one of the lowest grossing Best Picture winners of all time.

For Boone Isaacs, trying to hit her A2020 numbers, some things would have to change. The most logical pipeline into the Academy had always been the Oscars themselves: nominees are automatically considered for membership.

In 2011, the year before the LA Times article was published, 59 of the 178 invited members, or 33%, had been nominated for or won an Oscar. Seven years later, only 92 of 928, or 10% of the 2018 class had ever been nominated for an Oscar.

The Academy insisted it was “not lowering any standards, we are widening our net.” But if one of the main prior standards was an Oscar win or nomination, that seems downright impossible. And it was.

What makes the surge even more significant: membership was essentially frozen for years — actually shrinking slightly, from 5,830 in 2007 to 5,765 in 2012.

How about the diversity? Entering 2016, the Academy’s 6,261 voters were 89% white and 73% male — roughly 1,600 women and 700 members of color. These were the same people that handed Moonlight Best Picture.

Today's Academy has over 11,000 members: 36% women and 25% members of color. That's roughly 4,000 women and 2,800 members from underrepresented communities — women more than doubled, minorities more than quadrupled.

But one has to ask: with only 2% of the 2012 Academy members Black, with a Black Academy president and the Black community protesting, why on earth didn’t they just focus on bringing in more Black members? Wouldn’t that have been the most logical response?

Because if the goal was increased Black representation in the Academy, the results were not what they hoped for.

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More Diverse, Less Popular

Moonlight, and its wave of new Academy entrants, ushered in a new era of elite entertainment. While Moonlight was outrageously popular with critics, it was decidedly less so with audiences, grossing just $65m worldwide. Domestically, at the time of its release it was the second worst performer at the box office among Best Picture winners, after only The Hurt Locker ($17m against Moonlight’s $28m).

The Birth of a Nation had been built as a large-scale historical epic for multiplex audiences. Moonlight was a $1.5 million festival film. When Parker collapsed under scandal, the symbolic center of Black prestige cinema shifted from one model to the other.

Moonlight became emblematic of the kind of internationally acclaimed festival cinema that increasingly flourished within the Academy’s expanded electorate.

The lower box office went on so long that the Hollywood Reporter dubbed it a twenty year curse.

In a cruel twist of fate, Moonlight was also the last Black-directed film to win Best Picture.

This may have been because the Academy, reacting to #OscarsSoWhite, decided to diversify its pipeline as quickly as possible, which meant pulling new members from a new and very different talent pool.

We Are the World

Ironically, to hit their quotas for female and minority members, the Academy had to draw heavily from outside the United States.

As Jacob Savage has shown, as the Academy raced to diversify, the share of international voters more than doubled, going from 11% in 2016 to 24% in 2025. This year, like Boone Isaacs’s globetrotting flights, they made up more than half of all invitees, drawn from sixty countries.

What the Academy and Boone Isaacs may not have considered, is that those international voting populations have their own needs and agendas. European film funding, for one, is heavily influenced by prizes like the Academy Awards, where even a nomination, let alone a win, can be exchanged directly for funding.

The Academy went from a measured 2% Black membership in 2012, to… a figure it declines to disclose, hidden inside the 25% “underrepresented” category. As I’ve written elsewhere, the wealthy Chinese and the poor Black American are now lumped together into the same strange “underrepresented” bucket.

And those new international members knew who they wanted to see nominated: themselves. In the Academy's first ninety years, only nine non-English-language films were ever nominated for Best Picture — about one per decade. Since Roma in 2019, there have been twelve in eight ceremonies. Ten of them came from outside the United States entirely; the other two, Minari and Past Lives, were films the Academy's own rules deemed too domestic for the international category.

Since Roma, we’ve had Parasite (which won), Minari, Drive My Car, All Quiet on the Western Front, Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, Past Lives, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, and, this past March, both Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent.

One might counter that the field simply got bigger. It did — briefly, in 2009, and then again in 2022. But between those two expansions the Academy used a sliding scale, and the surge began right in the middle of it, under the smallest fields of the modern era: Roma was one of eight nominees, Parasite one of nine, Minari one of eight. It was the electorate, not the slots.

The commercial disparity between English- and non-English-language cinema is striking. English-language prestige dramas that break into the global theatrical market often gross between roughly $50 million and $300+ million worldwide, with major awards contenders sometimes exceeding $400 million. By contrast, many acclaimed European and Asian festival-oriented films typically earn single-digit millions to tens of millions worldwide, though occasional crossover hits reach much higher. Only a tiny handful —including The Intouchables ($427 million) and Parasite ($263 million) — have ever broken through to genuine global commercial success.

The reality is that 80-90% of global box office comes from English-language films, and 49 of the top 50 highest grossing films of all time are from Hollywood. The lone exception is a Chinese animated feature which was never even submitted to the Academy. So inviting in the rest of the world was a genuinely odd choice if the goal was popular cinema, the kind general, not elite audiences, pay to see.

In a strange way, Bong Joon Ho might be the greatest winner of #OscarsSoWhite.

But April Reign clearly did not have Bong Joon Ho in mind when she created #OscarsSoWhite after Selma. In spite of the cloudy people of color term, she obviously wanted more Black American prestige films nominated.

What Boone Isaacs delivered instead, was a voting body that awards Korean class satires and Spanish-language, French transgender crime musicals.

After Peck’s 1970 purge, The Oscars’ television audience generally grew during the 1970s, with several broadcasts ranking among the most-watched in the ceremony’s history. Viewership regularly exceeded 45 million, peaking at nearly 49 million for the 1980 telecast honoring Kramer vs. Kramer. That was 22% of the entire country back then. This surge coincided with Gregory Peck’s efforts to modernize the Academy and its membership, but there is little evidence that the membership reforms themselves drove ratings.

A more likely explanation is the extraordinary popularity of the New Hollywood era, when commercially successful and culturally dominant films such as The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Star Wars and other American films made the Academy Awards a genuine mass-market event.

Did Boone Isaacs’s great dilution at least revitalize The Oscars, like in 1970? Let’s look at the viewership numbers:

With our current population of roughly 342 million, that means about 5% of Americans watch the Oscars, less than a quarter of its peak. And why should they? Fewer and fewer popular films, American films, are being nominated.

This is a problem, because three-quarters of the Academy’s revenue comes from the Oscar TV rights. The whole reason the Best Picture Oscar expanded to ten entrants in 2009 was because, after The Dark Knight’s snub, they were hoping bigger movies would bring the audience numbers back up. Instead it’s turning into an international arthouse festival.

But perhaps the Great Dilution at least helped Black actors, which was what started all this?

How Did Black Creatives Fare After #OscarsSoWhite?

The decade since Moonlight has produced a troubling pattern: Black performers now win at the Oscars — but almost always in the supporting categories. Mahershala Ali repeated in supporting for Green Book (2019) alongside Regina King; then came Daniel Kaluuya (2021), Ariana DeBose (2022), Da'Vine Joy Randolph (2024), and Zoe Saldaña (2025) — a near-annual ritual.

Only two Black performers have won a lead acting Oscar since 2017: Will Smith in 2022 and Michael B. Jordan in 2026 — and no Black woman has won Best Actress since Halle Berry in 2002, a drought that survived the entire diversity revolution intact.

Berry, after over a decade had passed without another Black Best Actress joining her, reflected on what it meant in 2016:

“When I said [in my Oscar speech] that the door tonight has opened, I believed with every bone in my body that this was going to incite change, because this door, this barrier, has been broken. And to sit here almost fifteen years later, and knowing that another woman of color has not walked through that door, it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking because I thought this moment was bigger than me. And it’s heartbreaking to start to think, maybe it wasn’t bigger than me.”

That interview was now ten years ago. To this day no Black director has ever won Best Director; the closest call came this year, when Ryan Coogler's Sinners entered the night with a record-shattering sixteen nominations and left with four wins — Jordan's acting win and Coogler's original screenplay among them — while Best Picture and Best Director went to Paul Thomas Anderson.

Break the post-hashtag gains apart by category and the increase is bottom-heavy. Black lead nominations barely moved, while supporting nominations climbed, particularly Best Supporting Actress. Every additional Black acting win after #OscarsSoWhite came in a supporting category, offset by fewer wins in the lead categories.

The supporting-category loop was not created by A2020. Forest Whitaker's 2007 win was followed by fourteen consecutive ceremonies without a Black lead-acting winner — a stretch that produced eight Black acting wins, every one of them supporting, and that ran straight through #OscarsSoWhite and A2020 without interruption until 2022.

The revolution Cheryl Boone Isaacs spearheaded — growing the Academy to nearly twice its former size, expressly to answer a Black American grievance — has given Black performers two lead acting Oscars in ten years.

The overwhelmingly white Academy of the 2000s handed out four.

Black Actors were relegated to the same supporting-actor-loop as they were in the pre 2000s Hollywood, with more nominations, of course.

An Entirely Performative Fight For Diversity

While Elon Musk and other right wingers have projected outrage onto RAISE, the Academy’s new diversity and inclusion standards, it’s mostly overblown. The Representation and Inclusion Standards (RAISE) were announced in September 2020 and enforced beginning with the 96th ceremony in 2024. They require Best Picture contenders to meet just two of four criteria.

Standard A covers on-screen representation, but a film can bypass it entirely via Standard C (paid internships and training opportunities) and Standard D (diversity among marketing and publicity executives) — categories that describe the existing staffing of every major studio and most established distributors.

Standard B requires that at least two creative leadership positions or department heads, from a list of fourteen categories, come from underrepresented groups, and at least one of those must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

And even more blatantly, the reason a film from 1940, when Hattie McDaniel, the first Black Oscar winner, sat at a segregated table against the back wall, qualifies now is because eligibility is determined using the current submitting company’s present-day workforce and policies rather than the historical production itself. For re-releases or legacy titles submitted today, compliance is evaluated using the current submitting company’s present-day policies and workforce. They’re basically just glossing over the decades of exclusion.

While the standards are relatively lax for studios, several films — including studio product like Sonic 3, but also indies and foreign-language titles — now no longer qualify for Best Picture. In 2025, 36% of Oscar-qualifying films were ineligible. As World of Reel reported:

It should be noted that of the disqualified films, we’re not looking at any serious contenders for Best Picture. Among the titles excluded, there’s “Madame Web,” “Harold and the Purple Crayon” and “Sonic 3.” Then again, you also have respectable films disqualified, like Andrea Arnold’s “Bird,” Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” Magnus Von Horns’ “The Girl With the Needle,” Matthew Rankin’s “Universal Language,” and Michael Keaton’s “Knox Goes Away.”

Standards C and D measure internship programs and diversity among marketing, publicity, and distribution leadership—not what appears on screen or who made the film itself. In practice, they largely measure whether you’re a sufficiently large organization. A company like Sony clears them by existing. A small independent distributor releasing Andrea Arnold's Bird may not.

There’s a final irony in the box office numbers. Selma and Moonlight (with 7.5% of Selma’s budget) finished their theatrical runs with nearly identical worldwide grosses — roughly $67 million and $65 million — but the composition of those totals could not be more different. Selma earned about $52 million of its money at home, a story embraced by Black American audiences whose exclusion the hashtag was built to protest; it barely traveled overseas.

Moonlight inverted Selma’s ratio: just $28 million domestic, with more than half its gross supplied by the international arthouse circuit. The same $65-odd million, drawn from opposite constituencies. Selma, the film #OscarsSoWhite championed, found its audience in the exact demographic the movement claimed to represent.

Moonlight, the film the Academy awarded, found its audience abroad.

Coda

This March, ten years after Creed, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor and Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for Sinners — which took four Oscars in all, including a history-making cinematography win for Autumn Durald Arkapaw.

No boycotts or hashtags were required. All it needed was what had been missing in 2015 and 2016: a finished film with screeners, a campaignable movie star, a major studio, and a marketing budget — plus the one thing no activist can conjure, hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales ($369m to be exact).

Sinners wasn’t nominated because of a protest; it was nominated because Warner Brothers produced a Black-directed original blockbuster, hit their deadlines, and campaigned it like one. Whether a more American Academy would have handed it Best Picture over One Battle After Another is impossible to know — but it’s telling that after a decade of diversification, the question even needs asking.

After #OscarsSoWhite, Reign moved from one activist campaign to the next. She helped shelve Confederate, the Game of Thrones creators’ alternate-history series — a show with two Black co-creators, which died before a single script was written. Hollywood announces projects in the trades long before they exist, creating a soft target. An industry where social media campaigns can end shows in the womb is an industry that has even less risk, the lifeblood of art, at its disposal.

Where Are They Now?

DuVernay went on to an Oscar nom for her social justice documentary the 13th, and afterwards, with A Wrinkle in Time, became the first Black woman to direct a film with over $100m budget. Unfortunately, the movie became one of the biggest bombs of all time, losing Disney an estimated $152m. She has since moved into more critically acclaimed, social justice fare like the excellent, Emmy-winning When They See Us, and Venice-premiering Origin.

Nate Parker managed to make another film, American Skin, and premiere it at Venice, but has largely drifted into obscurity.

Barry Jenkins made the well-received, Oscar-nominated If Beale Street Could Talk, then the criminally-underseen Underground Railroad for Amazon. After his Amazon project, it seems he decided to finally stop being poor, and made a Lion King prequel — for which his Moonlight fans (honestly, a bit justifiably) gave him no end of shit.

Today, Reign works as a strategic communications consultant. Four years after creating the hashtag that transformed the Academy, she finally attended the Oscars herself in 2019.

Spike Lee said he believes his 2019 Best Director nomination for BlacKkKlansman would not have happened without #OscarsSoWhite.

He lost that year to Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, whose win for Roma marked his second Best Director Oscar — and whose film became the first in a new era of non-English-language Best Picture nominees that were, in many ways, the ultimate beneficiaries of #OscarsSoWhite.

The Academy set out to resolve a complaint about Black American representation, and it ended up bringing in the world.

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Years after I graduated from film school a former student emailed me. He was suing the school for fraud, trying to get his hefty student loans discharged, and he was looking for a copy of a report we'd both seen at a faculty meeting for evidence. It was an internal study on the program's flaws and problematic outcomes. At the time only half of the MFA students were making thesis films, partly because they were broke, partly because, as film students, they would write massively elaborate scripts, then collapse in a wave of unfeasibility as they neared production.

I dug through my emails and unfortunately came up empty-handed. I never heard from him again. I doubt the lawsuit went anywhere. It was probably just an outburst of rage, possibly after a festival rejection (we’ve all been there). He did sign the loan papers after all, so I doubt there was much he could’ve done.

After I gave up searching, I flashed on an old memory; my own starry-eyed visit to Columbia's pristine Morningside Heights campus, back when I was weighing which MFA programs to apply to. I was given five minutes with an admissions officer, who told me, first thing, unprompted:

“Don’t expect any financial aid.”

It rubbed me so wrong I never even applied.

Looking back, it was probably the most honest thing anyone said to me during the application process. Many of the schools seemed to view my very interest in them as a nuisance, just as Hollywood would later view my ambitions.

I wonder now, had I gotten into Columbia, would I have been able to resist the siren song of an Ivy League degree, with its mountain of toxic debt?

At such a young age?

It’s tough to say. I still ended up at an excellent, more affordable school, and don’t have a lot of regrets. As David Acevedo wrote in his 2021 piece on Columbia Film School…

It’s easy for elite universities to lure students into taking on stifling levels of debt. You’re getting a highly coveted graduate degree from, in this case, an Ivy League institution, one that’s in New York City, a young artist’s paradise. What’s that? $300,000 sounds like too much to borrow? Nonsense! The screenwriter of “Frozen” went here—maybe you’ll end up like her!

This essay will explore the rise of the luxury degree, in particular the film MFA. The term draws from polymath Rob Henderson’s idea of “Luxury Beliefs,” ideas and opinions that confer social status on the wealthy and educated while inflicting real-world costs on the working class.

In a similar fashion, the massively expensive, luxury film MFA degree confers social status on the rich, while creating massive debt for the poor and middle class, often driving them out of the industry before their stories can even be told.

How To Make A Killing in MFAs

When I started graduate school, after my tour of the stately campus, I was jolted back to reality by a student loan website. I was amazed to see the maximum number I could borrow: over $100,000 a year for a public program that would only cost me around $50,000. The difference was 'cost of attendance' — the school's own highly inflated estimate of rent, food, and living expenses, on top of tuition, one I could borrow every dollar of.

There were two types of loans: capped, unsubsidized ones (currently 8.07% interest for graduate students), and another, more plentiful kind; Grad Plus Loans, basically limitless, at a whopping 8.94% interest. As one economic study put it, Grad PLUS

“effectively eliminated federal loan limits for graduate students, making it the largest new federal student aid program in at least two decades.”

‘How was it possible to throw that amount of crazy high interest debt at a graduate film student?’ I remember thinking, before selecting the minimum possible.

Many of my classmates were not so prudent. Several used Grad Plus student loans, at 9% interest, to buy projectors, fund overpriced student films, and avoid working. Many were responsible, but oh boy, did a couple get to $300k in debt? You betcha.

And that was the intention; because these schools, especially the private ones, especially Columbia, were using film MFA programs as a cash cow to fund the rest of the university.

Columbia’s vice provost for academic programs said as much to the Wall Street Journal: master’s degrees “can and should be a revenue source” that subsidizes the rest of the university.

This was only possible for the last twenty years because every Grad PLUS loan had a silent cosigner; the federal government, and eventually the taxpayer.

"We're at a point where almost half of the borrowing right now is among graduate students, despite them being a much smaller share of the overall population," says Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. (via NPR)

Grad PLUS loans carried no real underwriting: no income test, no assessment of whether the degree could ever service the debt. A twenty-four-year-old with no assets could borrow six figures against the hope of becoming a Hollywood director.

Nobody praises film students for their financial prudence or realistic approach to risk. The industry, in the rare moments when it’s doing its job, thrives on smart risk. But at the professional level, studios and producers also understand that they can’t give their filmmakers unlimited money, lest they spend it all and leave them broke.

Like so many roads to hell, Grad PLUS was paved with good intentions. The previous era’s private lenders were often predatory, offering variable rate loans that the government tried to protect borrowers against. But the government was also not a savvy market participant like a producer or studio, very few of whom would have handed these students $300,000 to do anything, let alone direct short films.

There was one party who benefited extraordinarily from Grad PLUS; the film schools, which figured out something pretty quick. When student borrowing is limitless, there is no natural cap on tuition; a school can always charge more, and bears none of the downside if the bet goes south. And thus was born the luxury, elite film MFA, a cash cow for decades, only now coming to slaughter.

In Plus or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment, and Prices, economists studying the introduction of the Grad Plus Loan focused on a core question:

What happens when graduate students suddenly have access to much more federal debt?

The findings were troubling:

• Students borrowed substantially more.

• Schools charged substantially more.

• Graduate school did not become more accessible.

• Students were not more likely to finish degrees.

• Underrepresented students did not enroll at higher rates.

Even scarier: sticker prices rose roughly dollar-for-dollar with federal borrowing — though the net price students actually paid rose about 64 cents per dollar, with the gap covered by aggressive merit-aid discounting.

This is consistent with the “Bennett Hypothesis,” based on a New York Times article published by then Secretary of Education William Bennett in 1987. Back then, Bennett argued that when students can borrow more, institutions capture some of that additional aid through higher tuition.

Financially Hobbled for Life

In 2021 the Wall Street Journal broke the story. Recent graduates of Columbia's film program who borrowed left with a median of about $181,000 in federal debt, and two years out, half of them earned under $30,000 a year.

It turned out Columbia film alumni had the worst debt-to-earnings ratio of any major university master's program in the country, and that Columbia ran more high-debt master's programs in low-paying fields than any other Ivy League school. And roughly two-thirds of domestic students in the film MFA borrowed federally.

One international student, who couldn’t get access to loans, was so desperate he considered dropping out; Columbia offered him a dog walking job.

In 2021 the WSJ reported that graduate students, a far smaller population, were on track to borrow just as much as undergrads in the 2020-21 academic year.

By now they’ve vastly surpassed them. According to the Brookings Institution, Graduate students made up just 17% of enrollment in 2025, but accounted for nearly half of all new federal student loan dollars — about 49% of the roughly $90 billion the Department of Education expected to originate that year, versus 38% for all undergraduates combined.

NYU Tisch currently lists graduate film tuition at $82,902 a year, with estimated living costs near $43,000 and student film budgets that run from a couple thousand dollars into the five figures and climb each year.

The school’s own guidance puts the total a student must prove — to a bank, or to the federal government for a visa — around $130,000 to $140,000 annually. Roughly 8 percent of the graduate film cohort, about three students in a class of thirty-six, receive a full scholarship, and even that covers tuition only. No living. No student films. NYU film master’s graduates in earlier Scorecard cohorts left with a median of roughly $168,000 to $176,000 in federal loans.

Perhaps no other degree has the allure of a film one. Universities trumpet their famous, Oscar-winning graduates, a fraction of a percent of the actual alumni, as a means of luring young students into funding the rest of their universities. This is why Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America who’s written on this subject for decades, calls elite Masters Programs “The Second Biggest Scam in Higher Education.”

With debt to earnings ratios of ten to one common in the early years after film school, two groups emerge from these schools; the wealthy, who do not need loans, and the poor, who even with scholarships, do.

The Broken Hollywood Pipeline

The class composition of these schools is no mystery. At thirty-eight colleges in America, including Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Penn, more students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent. Just one example; Barron Trump is currently attending the school of business.

NYU's undergraduates have a median family income near $149,000; 62 percent come from the top fifth, 11 percent from the top 1 percent, and just 22 percent are poor enough to qualify for a Pell grant.

Kevin Carey has argued for years that “universities see master’s degree programs as largely unregulated cash cows that help shore up their bottom line,” and shown how even prestigious schools like Harvard offer effectively predatory programs.

And the taxpayer is the backstop: when these students inevitably default, or make it to the 25th year of their income-based repayment, the debt is expunged. Columbia collects the check, the students and taxpayers foot the bill.

But beyond all this, it’s killing our medium. Hollywood, which used to pay to train filmmakers and writers, is now, for obvious reasons, outsourcing all of the risk of building a career to the film schools and filmmakers themselves. Once that intense filtering is done, they can cherry pick the winners.

The problem is only a very select portion of the population have the financial resources to survive that system, and they don’t reflect the broader country, you know, the ones theoretically buying tickets.

Even more challenging; to survive the festival and film school system, you have to learn and adapt to their values; it’s an ideological training system as much as a craft one, and those ideological products seem to appeal less and less to audiences. The two breakout indie stories of the year, Obsession and Backrooms, have directors who dropped out of film school or never even went to college.

Rich and Poor, All Under One Roof

A couple of years ago The New York Times ranked NYU as the number one private school for the top 1% wealthiest Americans. Per Forbes, entering the top 1% requires a net worth of $11.6 to $13.7 million. USC comes in at number 2.

But what about scholarships? 8% of NYU directing students receive full scholarships. But even if you secure one, only three a year out of thirty six students, the award only covers base tuition. It does not cover university fees, equipment insurance, mandatory health insurance, student films, or NYC living expenses. If you are a domestic student on a full scholarship, it still means you’re forced to come up with around $60k a year.

This makes it unlikely that the crop of students who are getting indie films off the ground immediately after film school are the scholarship students, who even in these favorable circumstances are looking at six figures of debt.

There are thus two neighborhoods inside each of these schools; a fancy one, where there are no student loans, unlimited budgets for student films, and no talk of living expenses. Beside them are a slum, where even with huge scholarships you’re looking at six figures of debt upon graduation, compounding at 8.94% a year.

If you were from the slum, living next door to the fancy neighborhood, where nobody was transparent about their money, how would you try and compete? How about if someone was offering you unlimited amounts of debt?

You can see how this becomes a crisis.

The Film Festivals Are Stuffed With Elites

The top schools for the 1% perfectly tracks with major American film festivals’ alumni selections in their dramatic competition sections from 2017-2026.

To generate the pie chart below, I tracked the alumni makeup of all of the dramatic competition sections for the three major US festivals: Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca, for the last decade. Here they are combined, with the top 5 schools named:

Here’s Sundance…

SXSW:

And Tribeca:

As you can see, film schools, especially the elite troika (NYU, USC, Columbia), dominate.

Your humble Gadfly was more than a bit shocked when he saw just how poorly even the top public schools like UCLA, UNC and UT Austin really did.

The ties between these elite schools and the festivals, especially Sundance and NYU, run deep.

Tisch is the only major film school that is a Sundance "Institute Associate" — an organizational backer of the festival's nonprofit parent. For more than three decades it has also run "Tisch on Main," a hub it operates for its own community across the festival.

The obvious objection: NYU just admits more students. Except NYU and Columbia's graduate directing tracks admit the same number — about thirty-six. Yet over the past decade NYU placed roughly four times as many directors in these competitions as Columbia did.

It’s demoralizing. Especially when you consider how monotonous movies are right now. Maybe it’s because almost half of major festival films come from the elite graduates of a handful of private schools? Schools where the same teachers, the same philosophies, and the same students gather and cross pollinate?

Schools that also reify elite ideas and values. And c’mon, as we all know, those ironclad progressive values are kind of boring and predictable when it comes to dramatic writing anyways.

Even the “dropouts” aren’t all what they seem. Look closer at who 'skipped film school,' and: the overwhelming majority of Sundance’s no-film-school directors are famous actors (Paul Dano, Jesse Eisenberg), or industry nepo-kids. Barack Obama’s daughter had her first ever short film in competition there.

The actual nobodies — no degree, no name, no nepo — cluster far more heavily at SXSW and Tribeca.

I will spend more time on these charts in another essay, but it’s important to see how much these schools have come to dominate our industry.

The Government Finally Catches Up

The Grad Plus loan was originally designed to protect students from the private lending market, but instead, it incentivized a borrowing spree unlike any other, and accidentally gave overpriced elite programs the imprimatur of the federal government. If Columbia is accepting you, and the government is backing your loans, why not go?

Third Way called this a moral hazard for the universities:

Uncapped lending meant that students knew they could access loans to cover their costs for any graduate program, and institutions knew the check would clear. This cyclical lending environment created no incentives to lower costs, and some research has indicated it enabled tuition growth in graduate programs.

The floodgates are now being closed. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed in July 2025, eliminates Grad PLUS for new borrowers beginning July 1, 2026. The justification: Grad PLUS fueled unsustainable borrowing and pushed schools to offer expensive programs with "a negative return on investment." The OBBBA also mandated that programs pass an earnings test for attendees to be able to access federal student loans.

The universities fought it as best they could.

Jodie Ferise, a former lobbyist and college administrator, described Trump’s budget bill as a flash point for colleges, with many private universities pouring money into trying to influence the bill’s provisions. “The ‘big, beautiful bill’ caused tremendous anxiety in the industry as it went through its various iterations,” she said.

Columbia’s lobbying spend tripled in 2025, partly no doubt to fight this, but to no avail.

What replaces Grad PLUS is a hard ceiling. Most graduate students can now borrow $20,500 a year and $100,000 over a lifetime, with a higher tier reserved for a short list of professional degrees — medicine, law, dentistry and the like. A film MFA is not among them, and never will be.

The assumption is obvious; an arts degree, by any reasonable standard, is not a professional degree.

Now that the loan pipeline is shut off, something will have to give. Either the price of these degrees will come down, or the cohort will simply shrink to those who never needed the loans to begin with.

The latter may make the film industry’s class filter worse, not better. But it was also insane to offer people hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans, with no oversight, for a career that often pays peanuts, then let the taxpayer cover the difference.

The Rise of Elite Film Schools Created a Massive Class Barrier

The price of one of these educations could likely finance several small independent films. Films that, for their filmmakers, might have had a far higher educational value than the school itself. This was the path that Tarantino, for example, took with his first abandoned feature My Best Friend’s Birthday.

Kubrick too made a first feature, Fear and Desire, that he hated so much he spent the rest of his life trying to destroy every available copy.

That was back before the rise of the luxury MFA. Kubrick and Tarantino burned their money on shitty movies. The new film school system took that money instead, in exchange for massive loans.

I attended a top public school for an MFA, and think back often on it. I appreciated my time there, and learned a lot, even if I hustled to get out as quickly as possible. None of my most talented classmates are directing today, in spite of selections at top festivals. They simply couldn’t afford to keep making movies while servicing their loans. They drifted into corporate work or editing, where you can service the wealthy’s movies without taking the risk directing entails.

Some wanted families, and needed to afford them. Your SXSW selection also isn’t going to take care of you when you’re old.

All of us borrowed more than we needed to back then to make overpriced short films. We did so because we were idiots with a dream. Shorts are great audition pieces, but they do not need to be made for the budgets and associated debt these schools are driving people into.

Curry Barker dropped out of the New York Film Academy and made cheap short films like The Chair that got him noticed after he uploaded it to youtube.

Let’s look at his pipeline:

Look, Barker is also doing a lot of self-mythologizing, just like in the piece I wrote about Chloé Zhao. He clearly submitted to festivals, and got rejected by plenty. He also didn’t just upload The Chair to YouTube and “randomly” get 10m views. He built an audience brick by brick, and likely only went to it after the elite gatekeepers didn’t pick him.

But even with the failure and rejection, his path seems far more financially feasible than Zhao’s, or any of the other elite film school graduates. To put it in investing terms: if you’re not already wealthy, the MFA route has asymmetric downside, with debt that compounds at almost 10% a year. The Barker route has asymmetric upside; a low capital investment that can have tremendous success.

Notice that not only are the costs significantly lower, there are already revenue building devices built into this route, including a paid youtube channel, revenue from which can offset the costs of building the content. There’s also direct general audience feedback in the for, of comments, lokes and views. Again, not everybody’s going to succeed in this model, but the price of failure is far, far lower.

Also notice how much more of the Barker pipeline revolves around other people’s money, including Obsession. He got paid to make that. Your humble overeducated Gadfly was not blown away by it, but the audiences clearly disagreed with him, making it one of the most profitable indeoendent films of all time.

Another iconic example: three quarters of a century before Curry Barker, John Cassavetes built a little family of filmmakers and actors who helped each other out while making his low budget masterpieces like A Woman Under the Influence and Faces.

Those movies, their model, and their budgets, are accessible to ordinary people, but not if they’ve already borrowed $300,000 to make short films that will never recoup. Again, Obsession has already outgrossed the entire Sundance 2020s dramatic competition section.

Yes, you probably still have to move to LA or New York to find your crazy crew to work with. But you don’t have to borrow $300,000 to make $30,000 short films.

You may also need to make films in more audience-friendly online genres like comedy and horror, at least to start, but that’s still better than a lifetime of debt.

Timothee Chalamet recently got burned pretty hard for saying that he didn't want to work in forms where it's "keep this thing alive… no one cares about this anymore," like Ballet or Opera. But here’s the thing. A lot of independent film already is. Ballet and Opera operate on a conservatory model, just like the top film schools do. Europe also funds films just like any other fine art.

Cinema used to operate on a startup model; a ton of small, scrappy things, constantly failing, like salmon swimming upstream. With the conservatory between the filmmakers and the audience, it mostly just kills off the poorest aspirants.

We need the start up model back, the same one that produced Nolan and Tarantino, and just produced Barker. His breakout short The Chair cost just $2,000:

Money you work for and save yourself, otherwise known as skin in the game, is fundamentally different than abstract student loan money, and it always will be.

Another Way Out

I was recently in a debate online with a film journalist who said that we can’t know how many NYU alums at major festivals got there on scholarship. But the reality is that even with full scholarships, just paying for the cost of living and student films would likely put those same students in six figures of debt. Debt that somehow, somewhere, has to be repaid, and definitely not by unpaid, often self-financed indie features at Sundance or Tribeca.

For twenty years the federal government cosigned a panoply of bad loans, letting the universities charge more and more on the backs of students’ hopes, dreams and naïveté. That arrangement is ending.

Colleges and universities should be required to accept a portion of the responsibility for loans (including accruing interest) defaulted on by students who completed, or dropped out of their institutions, to be repaid to lending institutions over a certain time period. It’s the only way to incentivize them to improve.

For students without means, this new bill likely means that the gates will close on the elite networking and fundraising opportunities associated with these luxury academies. This did, of course, come at the cost of crushing debt.

I want to be clear that something real is being taken. But that thing — the right to mortgage your future for a rich kid's apprenticeship — was never what it promised, and led many people to a lifetime of financial pain.

Many feature films, including the Russo Brothers’ first feature, were made for less than the cost of one year of attending Columbia. Yes, most of these features people make are bad, but from a learning standpoint, they’re likely far more valuable, and far less costly. The Russos are now the highest-grossing Marvel directors, and the third highest grossing directors of all time, and they got their start with a low budget feature put on credit cards.

To paraphrase Tarantino: they didn’t go to film school, they went to films.

There are tremendously talented MFA educated filmmakers. But the system has become incestuous, the cinematic equivalent of haemophilia, and is slowly strangling its own creativity. Teaching everyone to make movies like a handful of rich kids, bankrupting the non rich ones in the process, is part of the problem.

Over and over again working class artists have remade industries, not by taking on crushing debt to try and make it like rich kids, but by innovating with limited means.

Your author is hopeful that those same filmmakers who would have borrowed $300k for student films, can learn their craft for far less money, iterating and putting their films online. I will write more about these people soon, and have done so already.

People may have to stop going to film school, and start going back to films.

The reality is that people of normal or modest means were never going to compete at the luxury MFA game anyways, and if you don’t have money, playing that game at all is a trap. Instead of borrowing to pretend you can live like those people, you have to pursue other paths that fit your means. That’s what real creativity is.

In the buckets we saw above, yes, there were an overwhelming number of graduates of elite film schools, especially at Sundance. But, especially at SXSW and Tribeca (not to mention Slamdance), there were also creative, scrappy filmmakers who didn’t have nepotistic connections, weren’t famous actors, and didn’t go to film school at all. Those are the people who truly rebelled against this system, the people we really need to look to for inspiration.

And Curry Barker’s early shorts and feature didn’t play any of those fancy places anyways.

If you did get slammed with crazy debt by this brutal system, my heart goes out to you. If you haven’t yet and are considering it, perhaps it’s not the right path.

For the universities, they will need to make do with less. Less loans, and more liability for those loans. The taxpayer should not be covering their largesse.

For the rest of us, we know the medium is stagnating. Perhaps these overpriced colleges, and the conformity they’ve been slowly breeding, is part of why.

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While I was working on my Annenberg Ouroboros Piece, about USC’s strange annual study of the top 100 grossing directors, a startling fact emerged.

Among the women who directed 2025's 100 top-grossing films, there were nine total: six Asian, three white, zero Black, zero Hispanic.

Every woman of color in the group was Asian - and for the first time, Asian women (and therefore women of color) outnumbered white women two to one.

And each of them share the traits of what I call Elites of Color (EOCs): from the highest-earning, most-educated subgroups. For the last decade or two, elites of color have been some of the accidental beneficiaries of Hollywood’s attempts to diversify. A large part of this is the progressive tendency to ignore subgroup differences, i.e, the Nigerian diplomat’s son is the same as the Mississippi descendant of slaves.

This is unintentional, but it’s an obvious outcome of the strange pipeline Hollywood has built over the last few decades by ignoring class.

As we'll see, "elite" here is doing triple duty — family money, elite credentials, and the positive-selection of diverse immigrants.

Before going further, let me concede what's true in the view I'm about to argue against. Representation has real intrinsic value: who sits in the chair shapes which stories get told, and seeing someone like you direct matters in ways no spreadsheet captures.

But the specific mechanism we use to pursue diversity — proportional representation across one enormous "BIPOC" bucket — is class-blind, and a class-blind mechanism, applied to racially aggregated groups with wildly different wealth and educational attainment, will reliably select the richest, most-credentialed members.

And this is where it gets a bit saucy, because, as I keep saying everywhere…

The BIPOC Term Obscures Important Class Differences

Annenberg, like all good university research programs, leans on the term “BIPOC” as their catch-all term for nonwhite. As the YWCA describes it:

BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Pronounced “bye-pock,” this is a term specific to the United States, intended to center the experiences of Black and Indigenous groups and demonstrate solidarity between communities of color.

As a term, BIPOC centers the specific discrimination experienced by Black and Indigenous people.

BIPOC aims to bring to center stage the specific violence, cultural erasure, and discrimination experienced by Black and Indigenous people. It reinforces the fact that not all people of color have the same experience, particularly when it comes to legislation and systemic oppression.

It’s a term specifically designed to center the discrimination experienced by Black and Indigenous people. But again, there’s an irony here: all of the 2025 BIPOC female directors are actually Asian.

Because six of the top nine grossing women were Asian (one as a co-director), this year's snapshot reads — on the surface — as a story of Asian female success at the box office. Six directors prove nothing on their own; treat it as a vivid illustration, and let the sturdier numbers below carry the structural weight.

There’s a clear class dynamic at play here: by the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances — the most authoritative wealth data we have — Asian American households hold a median net worth around $536,000, versus $285,000 for white households, $61,600 for Hispanic, and $44,900 for Black.

Asian household wealth is thus roughly double white wealth, nearly nine times Hispanic wealth, and twelve times Black wealth.

This makes the BIPOC data point extremely confusing; who are we trying to uplift and bring into the film industry here? The wealthiest BIPOC populations or the poorest?

There is also of course a huge disparity within the term Asian itself. Asians are the largest global population, so the term lumps together quite a few different people and nationalities.

And within the term Asian in America, there are huge class differences as well. These are the highest earning groups in the United States, with the top 100 directors’ subgroups highlighted.

Finally, as Pew Center research has shown, Asian immigrants are by far the most likely to be highly-educated:

Let’s start with how the top subgroups enter. The dominant legal paths for Indian, Chinese, and Korean immigrants run through skilled-worker and student-visa pipelines that screen, by design, for advanced degrees in high-wage fields.

With this filtering mechanism, you aren’t sampling India or China as a whole, you’re getting their top engineers, physicians, and graduate students. And notice how many of these directors arrived via Canada — Ganatra, Song, Kang, and Shi.

Canada’s immigration runs on an explicit points system that scores education and skilled work right at the border, if anything a harder credential filter than the American one. These women are, overwhelmingly, the children of immigrants chosen for their human capital.

Now look at the other Asia. The same census category holds people admitted by the exact opposite logic: refugees, screened for danger — Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian, Burmese, and Bhutanese families who arrived fleeing conflict. Per Pew, while roughly 75% of Indian Americans hold at least a bachelor’s degree, the figure falls to about 18% for Laotians and 15% for Bhutanese; Burmese and Hmong Americans carry some of the highest poverty rates of any Asian group (around 19% and 17%), and Burmese and Bhutanese households earn less than half the median. These Asians are not directing top-100 films.

Pull on these threads and the same pattern emerges: the industry selects for wealth, credentials, and diverse status — and because the first two vary wildly within each racial bucket, 'diverse status' reliably delivers the wealthiest, most-credentialed members of the group.

The Real Story

The real story here demographically is this:

1. Asian women from the top earning subgroups are doing exceptionally well in blockbuster commercial filmmaking.

2. White women are doing worse.

3. Black, Latino and MENA women are not represented at all.

Lumping everyone together into BIPOC simply obscures what’s actually happening.

Let’s look at the top female directors:

1. Nisha Ganatra (Freakier Friday) is of Indian descent, she came to Hollywood via Canada and has an MFA from NYU.

2. Celine Song (Materialists) is of Korean descent via Canada and has an MFA from Columbia.

   Fun fact: when your humble author visited Columbia Film School, the first thing the admissions officer said was “don’t expect financial aid.”

   

3. Chloé Zhao (Hamnet) is from China and got an MFA from NYU.

4. Hikari (Rental Family) is originally Japanese and got an MFA from USC.

5. Maggie Kang (K Pop Demon Hunters) is South Korean and studied at Sheridan College in Canada

6. Domee Shi (Elio) is Chinese-Canadian and also went to Sheridan College.

It’s interesting how many of them came from Canada: half got their start at Canadian colleges. More importantly:

All of them are in the top ten income groups from the Asian subcategory, and 2/3rds, all the live action directors, got MFAs from extremely expensive private film schools.

There are also three white women:

1. Madeline Sharafian (codirector on Elio) is Armenian-American with a BFA from Calarts.

2. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (I Know What You Did Last Summer) is the only one of the 2025 top-grossing directors to not go to college at all (interesting that she selected into horror). She worked her way up through acting and screenwriting.

3. Emma Tammi (Five Nights at Freddy’s) went to Wesleyan, consistently one of the ten most expensive private schools in America, which has become a feeder for Hollywood, including alumni like Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Julius Onah (Captain America: Brave New World).

Why Armenian ancestry qualifies as white is a strange and complicated story, but we see even here that there are two elite private degrees, and just one, of the entire cohort, with no college degree.

Indian and Chinese Americans aren't only high-income, they also have the highest college-completion rates. So some of this is education pipeline, not family wealth as such. But that's kind if the point — schooling, income, and financial runway all travel together, and 'BIPOC' compresses them all into a single checkbox.

If we were trying to build a formula for a bipoc group to produce a lot of successful directors, a hat trick emerges:

1. High income.

2. Elite education.

3. Diverse status.

The first two make them competitive for the nonprofit pipeline, the latter makes the nonprofits feel they’re doing good by selecting them.

Again, the path of these directors seems pretty explicitly driven at least partly by class. Six out of the nine directors have degrees from elite, private programs. There are no graduates of American public film schools.

It's worth being precise about what's actually doing the filtering, because at least three different things get bundled into the word "class," and they don't point to the same fix. The first is money: the family runway to spend years on unpaid or underpaid creative work without going broke. The second is credentials and access: an MFA from NYU or USC, especially if you can afford them without loans, opens doors. The third is BIPOC immigrant selection: the U.S. preferentially admits the most educated, most driven slice of diverse immigrant countries, so a Nigerian or Chinese immigrant's child can carry enormous human capital without the family ever having been "wealthy" in the American sense.

So when I say the system selects on class, I mean this braided thing — money, credentials, and cultural background — not net worth alone.

Again, none of the top directors come from Asian subgroups that are at the bottom of the income distribution. I won't pretend a sample this small proves the industry selects on income. But it's entirely consistent with a system that filters, at every stage, for the most-resourced, the most-credentialed, and increasingly at the nonprofit and festival level, the most diverse.

It’s also flatly inconsistent with the story “representation” and “social justice” is usually invoked to tell.

This Trend Holds Within the Black Community

As I’ve wandered through the film industry, I noticed something interesting; so many of the Black people I meet are Nigerian or Ghanaian.

And there’s a reason for this. The highest earning “Black” subgroups are, in fact, Ghanaian and Nigerian.

Nigerians are some of the most successful people in the Black subgroup for similar reasons to the Asians; a heavy focus on education, and a grind culture. They are the “tiger moms” of the Black community. For an interesting take on this, I recommend Anthony Onah’s SXSW film The Price, which focuses on the pressures young immigrant Nigerians face.

The film was originally titled Dara Ju. In the Nigerian Yoruba language, "dara ju" translates to "better" or "the best." It is often used to describe striving for excellence and continually improving yourself. Onah himself went to Harvard and then UCLA.

As you can see, Nigerian-Americans outperform even Asians in educational attainment:

All this is to say that many of the Black directors who succeed in this system are the first generation children of recent African and Caribbean immigrants. It goes to the highest levels: Barack Obama is first generation, half Kenyan, Kamala Harris is first generation, half Jamaican.

If nine directors are an anecdote, a decade of the Sundance Dramatic Competition is closer to a pattern.

Across the Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition from 2017 through 2026, twenty-four directors are identifiably Black . Of these, roughly a third — eight — are of recent immigrant heritage, the U.S. or foreign-born members of African and Caribbean immigrant families.

Notably, the overrepresentation lives entirely in the second generation; foreign-born directors alone (two of twenty-four, ~8 percent) actually fall just below their ~11 percent population share. The sharper pattern is not national origin but credentials. At least ten of these directors passed through NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, or 41%. If we include Yale and USC it hits 58%.

The divide sharpens if you look at who arrived without a credential. Every one of those eight immigrant-heritage directors holds a degree from a selective university or film school — six through NYU Tisch, the rest through Yale, Duke, Wesleyan, and Temple — and not one reached the competition without it. The directors who got there with no film-school training at all — Jerrod Carmichael, Radha Blank, Boots Riley, Laura Chinn, Eugene Ashe, and Elijah Bynum — are, without exception, U.S.-born descendants of the American Black experience rather than recent immigrants. The uncredentialed lane, the one that rewards a self-taught playwright or a rapper-turned-director, is open only to those already rooted here.

The two stories are not independent: immigrant-heritage Black Americans are far more likely to hold college degrees — 67 percent of Nigerian-born immigrants, against 26 percent of U.S.-born Black adults — so the pipeline that rewards elite credentials and the one that favors immigrant-heritage candidates are, to a significant degree, the same pipeline.

What the single "Black" category obscures, in other words, is less a quiet demographic substitution than a class filter: the directors who reach Park City are disproportionately the most credentialed members of an already-aggregated group, and U.S.-born descendants of slavery — about half the directors here but the substantial majority of Black America — are, if anything, underrepresented relative to their numbers.

Again, the class disparities within the Black community are even more extreme than in other groups. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in her excellent From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation:

She drives it home: the richest 1% of Black families average $1.2 million in net worth against roughly $6,000 for the average Black family — and as far back as 2007, Pew found 40% of Black Americans saying the diversity within their own community meant Black people could no longer be treated as a single race.

This again shows the absurdity of using race as a proxy for marginalization without including class factors, potentially of using race at all: it benefits only the elites of the groups it’s claiming to uplift, the people who generally need that support the least.

Musa Al Gharbi, in his excellent We have Never Been Woke, also makes the universalist turn directly. Programs meant for the marginalized, he notes, routinely end up serving the elites of those groups — and if the aim is to help people in need, "it isn't clear why a factor like race would be used as a criterion at all."

Target the disadvantage itself and you still lift the group disproportionately, without denying aid to desperate people because they're the wrong race. He goes on to cite Karen and Barbara Fields’s excellent Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life:

Hollywood’s “Soho House Diversity”

As Hollywood works to diversify based on gender and race, it has unintentionally been hardening the class lines for decades. I like to call this “Soho House Diversity.” It’s a private club based not just on race and gender, but also class (high entry costs) and credentials (an expensive, elite education).

This is probably apocryphal, but an interesting thought exercise nonetheless. The iconic Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Netflix’s Bridgerton, is the daughter of a professor and a university administrator, with a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth and an MFA from, you guessed it, USC.

Anyways, Rhimes once spoke to a class of Black Americans. She was trying to get more of the graduates to come to Hollywood. One student apparently raised their hand, then asked a question:

“So you’re telling me I have to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world, get an expensive graduate degree, then work unpaid jobs for a decade, while working at night to learn my craft, all in the hopes that I might find out in my mid to late thirties that I’m one in a thousand people who can actually break in and earn a decent living?”

Obviously this is not the story she was hoping would emerge, but again, if you’re from the lowest-earning income group, with the lowest net worth, our current Hollywood pipeline is a terrifying proposition. Let’s break it down visually:

The current Hollywood pipeline gatekeeps in extremely expensive ways: unpaid internships, expensive, private MFA degrees, decades of low and unpaid work, multiple self-financed indie films. The nonprofits try to correct this by obsessively focusing on race and gender, which is producing this tilted pipeline (yes I’m aware that there are a lot of rich white men, just not very many young ones at places like Sundance anymore).

Again, class data should be taken into consideration when promoting funding and mentorship opportunities, as I argued in my piece Survival of the Richest.

Film careers are unusually dependent on financial runway, making family wealth an important variable that current studies rarely measure. If the median Asian family has 12x the wealth of the median Black family, that’s a pretty compelling argument for what’s happening.

Under activist pressure, Hollywood didn’t solve the underlying class issues, it simply switched which elites it was taking. And because Black American poverty is entrenched for a variety of issues, the easiest groups to select were the wealthiest, most credentialed groups that were also Black.

Ignoring the subgroup differences was how they were able to diversify so quickly, again, per Annenberg, nearly doubling the BIPOC representation in the last twenty years:

Terms Like “BIPOC” Serve Intra-Elite Competition

I thought of these unique subgroup differences while reading Roshan Sethi’s recent LA Times polemic. The article opens on an image of Black women. But the marginalization it documents — and the author’s own demographic — point somewhere else entirely.

The ‘BIPOC’ frame lets a piece illustrated with Black women be written by an Indian, a member of the highest-earning group in the country, who also happens to be a medical doctor. But let’s hear what he has to say:

I would love to see the evidence for the Chinese backlash against the “white insularity of Hollywood.” Sethi certainly doesn’t present any.

The main study he does cite, like everyone who writes these kinds of op-eds, is the UCLA Diversity Report, a highly flawed study which I have read and may need to deconstruct in the way I did with Annenberg.

Sethi’s LA times piece has many of the same issues I already addressed in my response to Raquelle David, cherry-picking box office winners and ignoring losers.

He also uses “edgy,” borderline offensive terms like “white noise” to refer to films and television that feature white characters (imagine someone using the term “black noise”). It echoes Hillary Clinton's unbelievably unpopular "deplorables" comment, which arguably helped Donald Trump win in 2016.

He also obscures the massive differences that exist within these groups, and uses strange truisms like the one below.

Just on a basic level, Black actors have been at or above population parity in speaking roles in recent Annenberg/UCLA streaming counts (though lower in top 100 theatrical), while Latinos sit far below in both. I don’t have time to do the giant averaging critique of this study like I did with Annenberg, but the same issues apply to UCLA.

So shouldn’t we have more programs chasing Hispanic representation? (Also, the activist term Latinx is broadly hated in the Latin community and arguably contributed to Donald Trump’s reelection).

Equity, defined as racial proportionality, predictably routes opportunity to the wealthiest, most-credentialed subgroups inside each racial category. This perfectly fits his description of Nigerians (highest educational attainment), Indians (highest median worth) and Asians (you get it by now).

But many of these programs were designed with other groups in mind.

Virtue Hoarders

Sethi’s op-ed, like so many others, is an example of what UC Irvine Professor Catherine Liu might call “Virtue Hoarding.” The term refers to how educated, white-collar elites, who she calls the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), use performative morality, educational credentials, and progressive language to protect their class status and justify their superiority over the working class.

In her book, Liu specifically attacks the form of identity warfare Sethi is engaging in, saying that it directly leads the working class toward the right wing populism of figures like Donald Trump. To defeat Trump’s populist policies, she says, we need actual class struggle from the left, “not more identity politics, which has become just another vehicle of PMC virtue signaling.”

She traces the obsession with identity as a specific way of avoiding the broader class struggles necessary to reshape society in more equitable ways. Liu's argument is that this identity-first posture is itself a class strategy — performative morality that guards elite status — and that it shoves the working class toward right-wing populism. The PMC, as she puts it, "loves to talk about bias rather than equality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation.”

Note that there is not a single mention of class in Sethi’s op ed, and that it closes with what is essentially a self-congratulation. People like Sethi became doctors because they earned it through hustle, just like how they are apparently more deserving of Hollywood jobs.

Bonus: For those interested, Catherine Liu has done some delightful podcast appearances.

Elite Overproduction and Opportunity Hoarding

Peter Turchin’s book End Times: Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration is crucial for understanding the era we live in. As Musa al Gharbi summarizes in We Have Never Been Woke:

“Elite overproduction occurs when a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high incomes relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb them.” Those surplus elites, Turchin argues, then ally with genuinely marginalized groups to unseat the incumbents and take their place — alliances that don't hold afterwards, because at the end of the day elites mostly just want to be elites.

To put it simply: we are in an age of elite overproduction. There are more and more aspiring elites being credentialed by top film schools, and fewer and fewer high status jobs for those people to fill, particularly in the culture industry. To compete for those same positions, a sort of virtue war is forming among the elite, who use their identification with the marginalized as a means of scoring points and advancement against their rivals.

One of the most reliable ways that elites protect desirable jobs is by creating what Erik Olin Wright calls “social closure,” i.e. forcing people to get expensive credentials in order to gain access to certain desirable jobs like directing, via expensive MFA programs.

Wright is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who has been studying class for decades. His book Understanding Class is highly valuable. Drawing from Charles Tilly’s work in Durable Inequality, Wright discusses the idea of “opportunity hoarding” as a means of guarding class status.

As Wright puts it, "one way of achieving social closure is by creating requirements for filling the job that are very costly to meet." Educational credentials are the textbook case: tuition, admissions gatekeeping, and low-income applicants' rational fear of debt all wall off access — and that wall is the function, not a side effect. An NYU or USC MFA is social closure via diploma.

The USC / NYU MFA programs are a specific way of reserving special jobs for special people; the children of the already wealthy and educated. These people want jobs in an industry that is dominated by elite white incumbents, and one of the absolute best strategies for breaking in is a tried and true one; identifying with the marginalized in order to seem more virtuous than the incumbent elites.

But there’s a tension here. Gharbi expertly diagnoses this clever identification of the elite with the marginalized for their own advancement. As he puts it…

“Racial Reaganomics”

Gharbi goes on to quote philosopher Olufemi Taiwo, who designates these kinds of strategies as a form of “racial Reaganomics:”

Such treatment of elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.... after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South's megacities, to its countryside. But probably not.

The arrangement is reciprocal: majority-group elites have an interest in "consecrating" minority elites as "authentic" voices for their people, and those elites have every incentive to see themselves that way too. The overlap, Gharbi argues, is how elites from marginalized groups end up "legitimizing broader elite attempts to enrich themselves… in the name of social justice."

In an era where there are more and more qualified people for elite jobs, and fewer and fewer of them to go around, a strategy emerges wherein elites like Roshan Sethi, again a practicing doctor and successful television writer from the group with the highest median income in the United States, identify with marginalized people for their own advancement.

As Gharbi documents, "a radically disproportionate share of Black people capitalizing on affirmative action policies… are of immigrant or multiracial background," and tend to be "already affluent compared with most other Black Americans." The pattern isn't Black-specific: across ethnicities, and across gender, these programs reliably reward the already-comfortable members of the target group — affluent white women prominent among them.

This is the process at work in the current film industry, which selects for race and gender but not class.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Towards Solutions

To avoid these strange situations, the Hollywood, festival, and nonprofit worlds need some real metrics for class, so they can direct at least some of the resources they distribute to the people who need it most.

Some ideas:

1. For nonprofits: alongside the endless identity checklists, the indie film ecosystem could also screen for parental household income and net worth, like college financial aid applications do.

   

2. Hollywood: Stop requiring bachelor’s degrees and multiple unpaid internships for entry level jobs. Hollywood was built by poor, crazy outsiders, not ultra-credentialed elites. We need more of that energy again.

3. Pay interns. European production companies have long paid at least a nominal sum, €500 a month, to their interns. At the very least, have one paid internship opportunity reserved for people of lower income.

4. Rebuild the old Hollywood pipeline: actually pay people for apprenticeships, like Hollywood used to.

5. Screen not just for race and gender, but for elite education and backgrounds to make sure there aren’t too many.

6. Festivals: make lower budget films a priority, as they’re more accessible for the majority of people.

These suggestions will be uncomfortable for a lot of people, but if we actually want to help genuinely marginalized people, we clearly can’t eliminate class and just use race and gender proxies, or we’ll continue to get mostly the richest subgroups who still fit into BIPOC.

And of course we will; the film industry is a brutally expensive enterprise to join, one that now requires expensive degrees, unpaid internships, and thousands of hours of free work.

The Hollywood system, instead of training people like in the early studio days, now outsources that work to elite film schools like NYU, meaning it can cost $1m just to break in, if you’re lucky.

Who Are We Trying to Help Here?

Gharbi finds the same elite-school capture in prestige journalism that we've traced in Hollywood: newsrooms like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal now carry elite-degree shares rivaling the Forbes billionaire list. It's worth asking whether that credential bubble is part of why audiences — for the news and for the movies — keep drifting away.

As an old school American liberal, the group I feel most compelled to help are those my country’s history most directly harmed, Native Americans and the Black descendants of slaves. That was the wellspring of this kind of institutional support, but without class as a factor, a lot of skewed incentives and results have clearly showed up.

None of this is an argument against helping people — it’s an argument about whom this particular help was built for. The institutional support that hardened into “diversity” programming didn’t appear from nowhere; it was a response to two specific American injuries: the conquest, dispossession, and treaty-breaking done to Native Americans, and the slavery, then Jim Crow, redlining, and century-long exclusion from wealth-building done to the descendants of enslaved Americans.

What defines those histories isn’t only that they were brutal — it’s that the harm was inflicted by the continuous American state and compounded forward, which is why it still shows up, in wealth gaps that separate these groups from nearly everyone else, immigrant and native-born alike.

And that's the opening for a fix that doesn't need race at all. Because the injury now lives in something we can actually measure — income, family wealth, the runway to spend years working for free — we can aim at that disadvantage directly, instead of at the skin color that once stood in for it.

Do that, and the people these programs were built for, disproportionately poor precisely because of the state-built harm, get reached disproportionately. It's restorative without being punitive, it assigns hereditary blame to no one, and it doesn’t inflame identitarian grievances like those that brought us the Donald.

A recent arrival from one of the planet’s highest-earning, most-credentialed subgroups may face real racism — but they did not inherit that manufactured, state-built disadvantage, and often they land here already carrying more income, more family wealth, and more elite schooling than the Americans these programs were meant to reach. When a bucket like “BIPOC” lets the second group stand in for the first, it doesn’t widen justice. It quietly reroutes it — away from the people with the strongest historical claim and toward the people who need it least.

As we’ve seen here, sandwiching everyone together into BIPOC mostly helps the wealthiest subgroups. But is this social justice?

I established in Film Festivals vs. Activists that festivals and nonprofits have been selecting against white men for over a decade.

So shouldn't those resources be reaching the filmmakers who actually lack the runway — disproportionately Native, Hispanic, and the Black descendants of slavery — instead of the most-resourced members of whichever groups clear the racial bar? And once you put it that way, the cleaner answer isn't just discovering a better race formula. It's to stop using race as the proxy and measure the disadvantage we actually care about.

This is the universalist's case, put most sharply by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr., who argues that making "desert on the basis of special injury" the test for benefits is "the opposite of the socialist principle that everyone in the society is entitled to a reasonable and secure standard of living."

Race was always a crude stand-in for disadvantage. Drop the stand-in, put a floor under everyone, and — because injury and poverty overlap so heavily — you still do right by the people history actually harmed, without sorting anyone by ancestry.

On the measures that actually predict access to a film career — household income, parental wealth, educational attainment — the Asian women in this sample look more advantaged than the white women, not less. That’s no knock on anyone’s talent; it’s an indictment of a category that treats ‘nonwhite’ as a synonym for ‘disadvantaged.’

Perhaps the only way to actually help the marginalized — and not merely the most elite members of each marginalized group — is to stop sorting by race at all, and start measuring need.

Until we do we’ll keep funding the comfortable posing as the afflicted.

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As some of you have probably figured out by now, I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which is part of why I have such a hard time letting things go, including, perhaps ironically, a movie called Obsession.

For the past few weeks I’ve been puzzling over a post by Raquelle David, a Hollywood manager, called “Obsession Is 2026’s Biggest Box Office Story. A 20-Year Diversity Study Explains Why It Could Only Happen To A Man.”

To quickly recap for the people living on the moon, Obsession is a $750k horror movie that has grossed over $300m worldwide. It’s so successful it’s already outgrossed all 68 Sundance Dramatic Competition films this decade combined.

My response to David’s piece became too big for my other essay on the sizable flaws in the Annenberg Directors Study, the twenty year diversity study from David’s title, so I’m going to include my critique here as a separate post, as it makes separate arguments.

I’m critiquing this piece so hard, and the Annenberg study it uses, because it does several things I feel we need to stop doing; heavy pessimism about female directors, citing flawed data that makes women look less successful than they actually are, and feeding an endless narrative of female failure that is ultimately counterproductive.

Women, in spite of severe underrepresentation and significant obstacles, are making real progress at the highest levels of commercial filmmaking. According to Annenberg’s own numbers, they tripled from 2007-2025, no small feat. Directors of color nearly doubled.

That needs to be just as clear, and studied, as the obstacles they face. They need better studies, and better pipelines, if they want to keep advancing.

When a woman reads a piece like the one above, which implies her success is a structural impossibility, it could read as defeatist, like the game is rigged, and I sincerely don’t believe it is, at least not in the way these flawed studies describe.

One could call this “activist-pessimism.” It’s great as a tool for activists to try and get change NOW, but not so much for representing reality.

And it wouldn’t be true anyways. The reality is, as I discussed at length in my Annenberg piece, that activist studies systematically describe women as less successful and less empowered than the data actually suggests.

If that’s the case, then any explanation of the industry must account for that success, not just the remaining gap.

That’s the question I think these studies increasingly struggle to answer.

David’s Headline Argument:

David’s headline argument is this:

But the facts are far softer than they look.

David’s “Smoking Gun”

David opens with what she calls a “smoking gun”: a 2016 study from the film-finance firm Slated.

The line she’s quoting is correct; the Slated study found that low-budget films directed by women went out on roughly a third as many screens as men’s - 242 to 646.

I went looking for the study itself - methodology, controls, underlying data. It was never released. Ultimately, without those pieces available, it wasn’t really a study, it was an infographic, which is exactly what they call it.

What’s public is the handful of headline numbers in THR and Forbes, alongside the Medium Post. I can’t verify how the infographic was built, and neither can anyone citing them. But I can read what’s reported - so let’s read all of it, not just the one stat.

Start with what the study actually isolates by director. There’s exactly one such finding: that low-budget, 242-to-646 screen gap, a decade ago. At the studio level - films over $25 million, the tier my entire Annenberg essay is about - it doesn’t report a director number at all.

It switches to films “led” by women (produced, written, or starring) and finds distribution there roughly equal. Likely there were simply too few women directing $25M-plus films in 2010–2015 to compare, because that was the nadir of female blockbuster directors, as I’ll show later.

Either way, as David says, the documented gap against female directors is a purely low-budget phenomenon. The smoking gun never fires at the blockbuster level; it fires in the sub-$25M indie tier I’ve already argued is a different animal.

Slated’s Budget Range is Comically Large

Slated’s low budget feature numbers have a very odd skew: under $25m.

Read more

During the inevitable backlash to my unexpectedly viral Chloé Zhao piece, several people indignantly pointed me to the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s yearly survey, which produces yearly headlines like this:

I obviously love data, and controversial subject matter, so I was excited to read them.

But what I found was far worse than I expected, especially for anyone who really cares about solving the issue of female under-representation among top-grossing directors.

Put simply: IF more top-grossing women is the stated goal, the major Hollywood diversity studies ask the wrong questions, use weak proxies for commercial success, and therefore encourage interventions that do not actually produce more female blockbuster directors. They focus on outcomes, which are easy to measure, instead of processes, which are not. It’s like that old joke:

If we actually want more female top-grossing filmmakers, we likely need to radically redesign our current research. If we want gloom and doom headlines that make us feel self-righteous, then this is what we should keep doing.

The Studies:

The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is part of USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. Its marquee product - the one that generates yearly headlines - is Inclusion in the Director’s Chair, which tracks the gender and ethnicity of the directors of the 100 top-grossing films each year. Separately, Annenberg partnered with Sundance on a 2019 report analyzing submissions and acceptances to the festival, built on applicant-reported data that Sundance supplied, but neither party verified.

“Inclusion in the Director’s Chair” is regularly cited as borderline God’s truth by activists, the trades, and just about everyone discussing the issue of female underrepresentation in Hollywood. A search on Google Scholar yields 5,660 results, a substantial figure most academics never reach.

The study is divided into three sections:

1. Hot button data and charts

2. Key findings.

3. Solutions for change.

Dr Stacy Smith, who coauthored 2026’s edition with Dr. Katherine Pieper, has been on the circuit with these findings for decades, including a 2016 TED Talk called “The Data Behind Hollywood’s Sexism.” Here’s how the insititute describes itself:

The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, led by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, is the leading think tank in the world studying diversity and inclusion in entertainment through original research and sponsored projects. Beyond research, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative develops targeted, research-based solutions to tackle inequality.

Annenberg has grown into dozens of studies, and now includes casting, music, and many other areas.

From TED: “Stacy Smith studies how women are represented in film… starting with a simple headcount.”

Just how simple that headcount really is, we’re about to find out.

The UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report is better organized than the Annenberg study. It actually has a table of contents for one, which is helpful. It’s also broader, including cast, directors, writers, and, crucially, actual box office grosses.

It also has a ton of issues, some of which overlap with Annenberg, some of which are its own. I may address the UCLA Study in more depth in another essay, but its research is less cited, so not today.

I chose to focus on Annenberg because it generates more headlines, and has a much larger, longitudinal dataset than UCLA, which makes it easier and more valuable to investigate its claims. I will focus primarily on its directing study, as that one generates the most impassioned debate.

Again, I think it is an issue how few top grossing female filmmakers there are. But I also think that the entire pipeline of film schools, nonprofits, and film festivals are profoundly flawed if their stated goal is to produce financially top-performing female directors like Greta Gerwig.

And so, so many of this pipeline’s assumptions originate in these studies.

The Annenberg Study

As Annenberg’s most recent study showed, only eight of the top one hundred films in 2025 were directed by women. With one codirected film, there are 9 women total out of 111 filmmakers, or 8.1% of the directors of 2025’s top 100 films.

As you can see, they use highly inflammatory language like “progress has stalled” and elsewhere call it a “massive backslide.”

This study’s yearly publication is the beginning of a very unique, self-feeding outrage loop I like to call…

The Annenberg Ouroboros

Step 1: The Researchers. Annenberg releases its yearly report. It uses Sundance Dramatic Competition, a tiny, problematic sample (currently 10 films a year), as a flawed baseline for female commercial viability, then implies that, because of discrimination, not enough of those women made it through to the top one hundred most successful box office performers.

Step 2: The Trades publish this dire data unchallenged, perhaps because these documents are a real pain to read, and all the big stuff is already upfront in the charts for them anyways.

Step 3: The Indie Film Ecosystem becomes outraged, and the industry pipeline of film schools, nonprofits, labs, and festivals spring into action to try and bring in more female filmmakers. Sundance dramatic competition, for one, programs women at a much higher rate than their submissions, as shown in Annenberg’s own data from another study:

But Sundance, just like Annenberg, consistently selects for the wrong traits if the goal is more top 100 female directors.

Step 4: The Industry, which moves very slowly, but is actually improving, while also trying to run a business, largely ignores this new yearly crop of female directors (which is really quite small, maybe 5 to 7 a year).

Why? Well, the industry are the only people in this system with actual skin in the game, using their own money to place bets on who will succeed.

To keep that money, they mostly ignore the female directors from Sundance Competition, who they perceive as commercially unviable, as demonstrated by their box office.

The box office is, of course, one of the only tangible metrics of success in this entire process, one which also can’t really be influenced by Sundance or other nonprofits.

So the industry once again improves very gradually, pulling from a very different, more functional pipeline, which Stephen Follows very intelligently broke down in a follow up post to this one. (Hint: screenwriting and television are far bigger feeders than Sundance Dramatic Competition). Soon another year passes, Annenberg publishes a new study, and the outrage cycle repeats itself.

It’s like the mythological Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Annenberg Study sparks the same endless feedback loop, year after year, while the industry actually makes very slow progress, on the order of .3% a year (likely a bit more), from 2007 to 2025, according to Annenberg’s own data.

So, now that we understand how this works, let’s get to critiquing this very strange study:

The Top 100 Directors Problem

Annenberg only follows the top 100 grossing films every year, which are the absolute end of a very long, intensely-winnowed pipeline of commercially-oriented talent.

The study implicitly assumes that blockbuster directing is the highest order of filmmaking success, and equally desirable to all filmmakers.

Annenberg also assumes making a top-100 film is the goal of everyone who enters filmmaking, and that unequal outcomes thus imply discrimination.

Based on this logic, it’s a failing of the film industry, and evidence of systemic discrimination, if a talented filmmaker like Debra Granik, who made the beautiful Winter’s Bone and the criminally-underseen Leave No Trace, doesn’t direct a Transformers movie.

Did Debra Granik actually want to direct Avengers, or does she simply value a different kind of filmmaking?

It’s a bit like saying the only reason classical pianists at Juilliard aren’t next to Taylor Swift in the billboard top 100 charts is because of sexism.

The study treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination, but it doesn’t even establish that women and men, let alone in equal numbers, are pursuing the same goals in the first place. Competition to enter the top-grossing director world is very intense and heavily favors older, proven incumbents. Men and women may even self-select into that pipeline in different numbers. Again, we don’t know, because the study doesn’t investigate this.

For example, Celine Song’s first feature, Past Lives ($42m), was a critically acclaimed romantic drama. Her second, Materialists ($106m), was a romantic comedy-drama, a more commercial genre, with recognizable stars. This is notable because the indie film ecosystem generally requires directors to make films like Past Lives before they can make films like Materialists. Yet it was the latter that moved Song into the top-100-director list.

Song’s Materialists is an original movie, and a path that Song actively chose. If she had chosen to spend her cultural capital from the success of Past Lives on a different, more art-housey kind of project, it’s unlikely she’d join the top grossing directors. Would that be a failure by Annenberg's logic?

Again, for many, many reasons, it’s already problematic to use the top one hundred box office performers as a proxy for all filmmaking success.

Nonprofit institutions primarily exist to support artistic films, not commercial ones. That’s a perfectly legitimate goal. The problem arises when those same artistic films are treated as proof of the director’s blockbuster potential.

Sundance Competition Is a Poor Proxy for Blockbuster Success

At various points in the Annenberg study, they use the Sundance dramatic competition as a one to one proxy for talent and future commercial success, then imply that those directors not transitioning into Hollywood blockbusters is proof of discrimination.

In a truly bizarre chart, the study moves in reverse chronological order from Sundance Dramatic Competition 2026, to 2023 TV Directors, to 2024 Netflix feature films, to the top grossing films from 2007-2025.

Just from a basic sense of logic, shouldn’t we start in say, 2020 and follow a cohort chronologically through these perceived natural steps into top-grossing movies?

Wouldn’t that be better evidence for this as an actual pipeline at all? Is there any evidence that this pipeline is real? That it works for men and not women?

Even stranger: only one of the women in the top 100 this year has even had a film in Sundance competition; Chloé Zhao with Songs My Brothers Taught Me, a small film that flopped commercially over a decade ago.

Song’s Past Lives played Sundance, but in the premieres section. Same for Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night. Emma Tammi’s first feature The Wind premiered at Toronto. Hikari’s first feature premiered at Berlin; she’s never had a film at Sundance. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson was a screenwriter whose first feature Someone Great premiered on Netflix. The others came from animation, which produced just as many top female directors as Sundance.

The numbers are real: women do cluster in the lower-budget, lower-risk tiers - 63.6% of Sundance dramatic, 37% of TV, 20.5% of Netflix - and go scarce at the top.

What's invented is the arrow between them. Calling those tiers a "pipeline" and the top-grossing gap a "drop" implies they're sequential rungs a director climbs, so the scarcity at the top reads as leakage — qualified women lost along the way. But nobody climbs these rungs in order.

Gerwig didn't touch Sundance Competition, TV, or Netflix before Barbie; Zhao never directed television; not one of this year's top-100 women walked the ladder step for step. These aren't four stages of one career. They're four different populations, chosen by four different gatekeepers on four different criteria - and a non-commercial showcase feeding a commercial box-office endgame is a simple category error.

Annenberg published an even stranger “pipeline for women directors” in their 2019 study, this time going from the Sundance directors lab, to short films, to dramatic features, to episodic tv, to top grossing films:

This is what they call a pipeline? The Sundance director’s lab is the natural jumping off point for commercial-minded filmmaking? Before you make short films? It’s bizarre.

That bothersome question of intent also holds true for the other parts of this pipeline; do all TV directors want to direct large franchise movies? Do all Netflix directors? Did Celine Song even know Materialists was going to pass $100m?

Don’t a lot of indie directors use TV as a financial support system while chasing their smaller arthouse projects instead of big franchise movies?

But even more interesting is a crucial, unanswered question:

Why don’t the female Sundance competition directors make it to the top 100?

The study implies discrimination, but presents no real evidence. It never demonstrates, for example, that the Sundance pipeline works better for men than women - a basic comparison necessary to support that claim.

A genuine pipeline study would at the very least compare male and female Sundance directors with similar budgets, genres, critical reception, and commercial performance, then examine whether and how their careers diverge afterward. Annenberg never performs that analysis.

This chart also implies that Sundance dramatic competition selects solely for commercial instincts and does so better than any other talent pipeline. It implies that female Sundance competition directors are the most qualified for and interested in directing blockbusters.

But this assumption is also severely flawed. Sundance Competition is an inconsistent pipeline to blockbusters, and the films skew uncommercial.

If anything, Sundance competition of late seems particularly bad at selecting for commercial viability, as my study of the 68 Sundance competition films from 2020-2025 has shown. As I wrote then, Obsession, one low budget horror film, has outgrossed all 68 Sundance dramatic competition films combined, including box office and streaming deals.

Surely there’s another, more commercially viable source of emerging female directors to study?

The second major problem:

The study treats a selection in US Dramatic Competition as proof of female qualification to direct blockbusters. But Sundance itself has heavily increased the share of female-directed competition films over the past decade, meaning the benchmark is already tilted by their own decisions. Again, Annenberg has shown this in their own research:

Comparing all of these different types of entertainment to blockbusters is apples to oranges. Unlike indie films, blockbusters generally work on clear, market-based incentives.

As the chart above shows, it’s far easier to change the inputs and outputs for institutionally-controlled prestige pipelines, like Sundance, than market-controlled ones like blockbusters, which rely on the decisions of millions of ticket buyers, and verifiable outcomes, i.e. box office.

Television and Netflix also operate under different economic constraints than theatrical tentpoles. They involve less concentrated financial risk, and are thus far easier to diversify.

The Sample Size Is Tiny

Even with Sundance’s over-selection in favor of female filmmakers, this is still a comically small number of filmmakers entering the pipeline.

Across the entire 20-year Sundance Dramatic Competition dataset (2007–2026), there were 286 films, 108 of them with at least one woman director, or 38%.

The early era programmed 16 films a year; the later era dropped to 10–12, alongside a sharp rise in the share directed by women.

16-film era (2007–2020): 32% | 72 of 224

10–12-film era (2021–2026): 58% | 36 of 62

Put that in perspective: there are fewer female-directed films across all 20 years of Dramatic Competition (108) than there are blockbuster directors in a single year (111).

Here’s a thought experiment. Treat each of those 108 films as a distinct woman director - generous, since some directors appear more than once - and suppose every one of them entered Hollywood and directed a blockbuster every three years.

108 directors ÷ 3-year cadence = 36 films a year. 36/111 = 32%.

Even granting all of it - every director advancing, which is impossible, each working at a steady three-year clip - the pipeline still lands at 32%. Reaching 50% would take roughly 167 active directors at that pace. It isn’t even close.

Sundance Selects Against Commercial Genres

There’s an interesting factoid buried in the “bottom line” section of the UCLA Study; the most profitable and successful films of 2025 by genre.

Here I have to be precise, because two different definitions of “success” are in play here, and they point at different genres. If success means top-100 gross - the metric this entire essay and the Annenberg study use - the genre path runs through science fiction, fantasy, and action: the tentpole tier.

If success means return on investment, at lower budgets more accessible to emerging filmmakers, then horror is king.

Low budget, high-return genres like horror often function as a proving ground for commercially-minded directors, who demonstrate returns on a small budget, then scale upward. Sam Raimi and Jon Watts, who directed different editions of the Spider Man franchise, both followed versions of that path, each starting with low budget horror films like Evil Dead (Raimi) and Clown (Watts).

So if we’re trying to pull the most financially successful directors out of Sundance, what genre of films did the last decade of Sundance competition program?

Drama is by far the most popular genre of film programmed at Sundance, and yet it’s the third-worst performing genre financially. Horror is the most financially successful genre in terms of profit, and yet only 2 horror films in the last ten years were programmed in Sundance competition, the section Annenberg uses as a proxy for commercial qualifications in female directors.

So whichever definition you choose - biggest gross or best return - Sundance competition optimizes against both. It programs prestige drama: the third-worst financial performer, and the genre least likely to either crack the top 100 or post horror-like returns. It’s an arthouse showcase, which is precisely why it’s such a broken proxy for either kind of commercial filmmaker.

If Sundance were an actual pipeline to commercial success, as the study claims, it would select very different types of movies. But it doesn’t.

Sundance is an arthouse institution, which is why it’s a terrible proxy for blockbuster potential.

But we all knew this already. It’s in their mission statement for crying out loud:

If Sundance wanted to produce more commercially-viable female directors, you would see a lot more horror films in competition. I’ve shown elsewhere that female directors in the early 2020s were selected more for prestige, which institutions control, than commercial instinct, which can only be verified by audiences.

This was a mistake, if the goal is box office. On a $200m movie, I don’t see how you can have any other goal.

The best example of the traditional pipeline working is Greta Gerwig, who demonstrated increasing commercial success on escalating budgets (Lady Bird, Little Women) before her blockbuster Barbie.

But again, Gerwig didn’t follow the imaginary Annenberg pipeline: she didn’t premiere in Sundance Competition, she didn’t direct television, and she didn’t direct a Netflix movie before Barbie.

Also of note, since the industry selects so heavily for class, horror films are the most popular with the working class, and align most with the makeup of the general population. As I’ve implied elsewhere, there is a direct conflict between elite institutions’ tastes and those of the general population. The more directors come through the former, the less interested the latter seems to be.

Again: horror films are also almost never programmed in Sundance competition.

Annenberg Mistakes Signal for Noise, and Stock for Flow

The Annenberg study regularly uses one year, single digit percentage shifts as evidence of catastrophic industry setbacks for female directors, putting scary observations in all bold and italics:

This is a textbook confusion of stock and flow.

The population of top-grossing directors is a stock - a standing pool of incumbents who sit on their thrones for decades. The average top-grossing director is about fifty, up roughly six years since the mid-nineties, and the tier keeps aging for a simple reason: the same names cycle back through, and fewer new ones break in.

The directors newly entering that first time blockbuster tier each year are the flow - and in an industry this competitive, the flow is a trickle. The tub is nearly full of the same people, the drain is all but plugged, so the female share of that pool moves only a fraction of a percent a year, no matter what happens in any one season.

And it’s specifically the blockbuster tier that’s the chokepoint, not directing as a whole. Again, according to Annenberg’s own numbers, women directed 37% of television episodes in 2023–24, 20.5% of Netflix movies in 2024, and 63.6% of the films in Sundance’s 2026 Dramatic competition. Women aren’t missing from the director’s chair. They just thin out heavily on their way to the hundred biggest theatrical releases.

When it announces female directors “fell” from fifteen to nine and brands it a massive backslide, the problem isn’t that six films is trivial - against a yearly inflow this thin, six is a lot. The problem is the opposite: the numbers are so small that a swing of six tells you almost nothing.

Run the actual test - fifteen of 112 directors against nine of 111 - and the drop comes back statistically insignificant: a gap that size shows up by chance about one year in five, even if the underlying rate never moved an inch. With a flow this narrow, single-year moves in either direction are mostly noise, and reading any one of them as a trend - backslide or breakthrough - is the error.

Blockbusters also take a minimum of two to three years to make. This year’s count reflects greenlights from years ago, which Smith herself concedes were locked in before the 2024 election. So the “backslide” reflects bets placed years ago, not some fresh wave of discrimination anyone could plausibly pin on the current moment.

And none of the top directors, men included, make a massive movie every year anyway. It’s physically impossible, and even if they could, they’d drop dead.

So why does Annenberg treat these one year variations as catastrophes? Well, one explanation might be that the study is published every year, and thus needs new headline findings.

Gradual, statistically noisy progress (what’s actually happening) is far less catchy than catastrophic headlines.

Imagine the truthful headline: "things are gradually improving for female directors, but in a lumpy way, on the order of around a quarter to a half a percent a year.”

Is that going to generate clicks for the trades? Probably not.

But what about the signal? Well, honestly it looks a lot better, but through strange data practices, the study shows the opposite.

The right way to read a series this jumpy is to stop reading single years at all. A one-year move - up or down - is mostly noise; the signal only emerges over multiple years. Like all data you can read it several ways, but a more meaningful way is to look by decade:

• 2000s: ~4.8% female | though this is only 2007–2009 (2.7, 8, 3.6), and adding the earlier years would likely drag it down.

• 2010s: ~4.9% | almost zero progress.

• 2020s: ~12.0% | holy crap! More than double the decade before! Hallelujah!

That’s the signal: a decade of stagnation, then a genuine boost.

Even if you insist on the cruder, single-year endpoint version - 2.7% in 2007 to 8.1% in 2025 - the number of female directors still TRIPLES. Amazing!

Year over year it’s about .3% growth. And 2025 was a weak year, so that 3x is a conservative read.

Which is what makes that 6.6% so strange - the one number they lead with on the right. It’s a nineteen-year pooled lump that blends a 2.7% world and a 15% world into a single figure describing no single year on the chart and no direction the data is moving.

You see how odd it is that that’s the only one they use?

Here’s what the same chart looks like, interpreted more honestly:

Here’s another fun variation:

The Same Problems Exists in the BIPOC Section

The study also focuses on diversity, and presents the following chart:

Looked at in simple chronological fashion, from 2007-2025, by any metric this is also a huge success. The underrepresented directors were 12.5% in 2007, now they’re 24.5%.

The number of underrepresented directors ALMOST DOUBLED since 2007! By any reasonable measure, that represents substantial progress. It shows that the industry is becoming more diverse, by significant numbers, over time.

I won’t belabor this point too much, since it’s basically the same flaw as the female directors section.

Yes, it is very slow growth, on the order of .6% a year, but becoming a top-grossing director is a brutally competitive industry that selects for consistent, growing commercial instincts verified by financial success metrics, which knocks most people out of the pipeline very quickly.

And once someone becomes an incumbent, they hang out there for decades.

The most elite cohort of directors, the top-grossing directors of all time, is even older. And this makes sense, because it takes a lot of time to make movies, and it’s a cumulative number.

Here are the top-grossing directors of all time and their ages:

The average age is 64. It takes a long time to become a top grossing director of all time.

P.S. The BIPOC category also obscures meaningful differences between groups. Notably, all of the 2025 women of color were Asian women, a topic for another piece.

Panic in the Streets of Hollywood

As you can see above and below, activists and media outlets repeat these flawed claims completely unchallenged, as if there were a men’s only highway built from Sundance Dramatic competition to a special bunker in Hollywood.

Fellow Substacker Raquelle David recently published a post which again relies on this flawed Annenberg data:

Can you see it? It’s the ouroboros. The media-sphere reinforces Annenberg and Sundance, and the process repeats. Over. And over. And Over.

Ripple Effects

Those positive-but-slow growth numbers, POC filmmakers almost doubling since 2007, women tripling over the same time period, isn’t what Annenberg wants us to focus on.

Instead, the chart highlights the average representation over the 19 years, but not the progression from 2007 to 2025.

This is bizarre, and masks significant progress. They say as much, the chart says in BIG BOLD LETTERS that…

But this again is misleading: we’re moving forward in history, so including the worst years from over a decade ago obscures the trend in a weird way.

It does the same thing with POC directors:

This “overall” figure is actually the 19 year average. But that includes the worst, early years, and isn’t really representative. There has actually been solid, if lumpy growth since the low point in 2011.

These right-hand figures are the numbers people fixate on in debates. I was recently having an online back and forth with a Black filmmaker who told me 85% of Hollywood directors were white, then directed me to these studies. But they’re not 85% white IN 2025, they’re 75%, which is a fairly big difference.

Like many people, he just glanced at these misleading, very large statistics on the sidebar and didn’t question them.

The tragedy is that all this attention is focused on the least useful question. We know how many women reached the finish line in a given year. We still know remarkably little about the pipeline itself.

Which women were one studio meeting away from a franchise job? Which career paths produce the highest success rates? Which barriers matter most? After nearly two decades of research, those remain surprisingly difficult questions to answer.

Of course this is going to generate ragebait headlines like this:

And of course it sparks a thousand think-pieces, just like in the press.

But progress has not been fleeting. Even though Hollywood is getting objectively, gradually better, this deceptive use of data makes it look far worse.

Again, the whole framework is so misaligned with its stated goals that it simply can’t produce those results.

Nota Bene: I have many more critiques of this study, but this piece is already very long.

Annenberg’s Solutions Are Flawed

Annenberg ends on a “solutions for change” section, where they offer three flawed recommendations:

1. One Opportunity is Not Enough

Annenberg says that women and underrepresented directors receive only one chance to direct a top grossing film. This is also mostly true of men, which I pointed out in my piece on top grossing female directors. The key seems to be getting the right opportunity at the right time. As I wrote in that piece:

A campaign online has begun to give Nia DaCosta a second chance, but men rarely receive these as well. Louis Leterrier never made another Marvel movie after the Incredible Hulk failed. Alan Taylor did get a second chance after Thor: The Dark World bombed critically (though provided a decent box office showing) with Terminator: Genisys, another critical bomb, but this was not within the Marvel universe. Taylor has not directed another blockbuster, and since returned to television. Peyton Reed, director of the relative bomb Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, (but also notably the series’s more successful first two entries), has moved into television as well.

If a director like Celine Song were interested, she seems to be in a good position for a larger budget now; she’s already demonstrated growing box office success, an ability to work with stars, and a commercial sensibility. The question is whether she wants to do that or not. Like Song, half of the top grossing films directed by women were original material in 2025.

And I’m grateful for that! I liked the Materialists! We need more original material!

1. Use Clear Criteria

This recommendation is a bit ironic and difficult to evaluate because the study never establishes what the actual blockbuster pipeline looks like.

As I’ve shown, using Sundance Dramatic Competition as a benchmark for commercial viability is severely flawed.

Gerwig seems to be the best, most repeatable model; a suvvessful original film, followed by growing budgets and box office success in popular IP genres, leading into a true IP blockbuster, where the filmmaker’s vision is trusted because of that proven track record, not their identity.

1. Continue To Invest in Pipeline Programs

This is the most ouroboros-like argument in the piece. The flawed pipeline will not work for generating top one hundred filmmakers unless the pipeline successfully identifies and selects for the right traits. Sundance Competition was never designed to be a pipeline program for top 100 directors, and it’s absurd to claim that.

They could of course rename to the “Sundance Female Horror Director Competition,” but I suspect that’s not their bag.

It reminds me of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes:

Phase 1: Invest in the pipeline.

Phase 2: ?

Phase 3: More top-grossing female directors!

Then, when it doesn’t work, they just repeat phase one all over.

Honestly, the whole framework needs to be broken down and rebuilt.

What would good research actually look like?

If we genuinely want to increase the top-grossing female director pipeline alongside the indie pipeline, we’ll need different inputs and data than what we currently have.

We’ve established that the Sundance Dramatic Competition is a highly flawed proxy for commercial success, but we need more clarity on what the actual pipeline looks like. I’ve made suggestions here, but it’s beyond the scope of this essay to create an entire new pipeline. (Fortunately, Stephen Follows did the work to identify the real one.)

Better research on this issue would track the actual careers of women who have a clear desire to enter the blockbuster system through multiple financially-successful commercial projects, with steadily-increasing budgets, including…

• their first feature

• their second feature

• their first studio hire

• And their first franchise hire…

All while also carefully controlling for the elements we know lead to successful blockbuster performance; growing budgets and commercial success, just like Gerwig, who went from Lady Bird, to Little Women, to Barbie.

Gerwig is the clearest proof-of-concept we have: growing budgets and box office in popular genres, leading to a true blockbuster on the strength of a track record, not an identity. I want to be careful not to over-build on one career - Barbie is an outlier, not a template. But the arc - escalating commercial success earning escalating trust - is exactly the hypothesis a real cohort study would test.

Again, these women also have to be selected for a clear desire to take that path.

Actually following cohorts of both men and women, who are trying to break into the top 100, comparing and contrasting what genre of films they made, how they performed at the box office, and how they took the next step would be a truly useful exercise, as would systematically interviewing the top box office performing women each year to see what can be learned for future cohorts.

What obstacles did they face across the cohort? How did they overcome them? If they encountered sexism, how did they deal with it?

Institutions could poll the women on the types of directing jobs they’re pursuing, and whether they got them or not, and why. If they didn’t, were they beaten out by a man or a woman? Why?

There could also be mentorship and training sessions for those women going into those pitches from more established filmmakers who’ve already succeeded.

If women are consistently going out for the same big studio jobs as men, with similar qualifications, then losing, this would be a much more persuasive argument for persistent discrimination. Maybe it’s already been made, but not by Annenberg.

This is also not terribly difficult to implement. It can be anonymized to protect the women, and could be activist gold if we really want to change the system.

Proof of Concept

For the clearest evidence the loop is real, you don't have to look far. In December of 2023, Dr. Smith announced she was co-founding an accelerator for women, trans, and nonbinary filmmakers called Proof of Concept, alongside Cate Blanchett and her producing partner Coco Francini, with funding from Netflix.

Its launch announcement justifies the program by citing Annenberg's own headline number: only 6% of directors across the 1,600 top-grossing films - sixteen years' worth - were women. But that 6% was already stale when they reached for it. In December 2023, the most recent year on their own chart, 2022, sat at 8.9%, and 2023 would land at 12.1% — double the figure they used to sound the alarm.

They grabbed the oldest, lowest framing on the board. The current report's version of the same pooled number is 6.6%, higher only because those strong recent years finally got folded in - and a headline stat that ticks upward every time reality improves isn't measuring the present.

So the report sounds the alarm, and the report's author builds the response - the whole loop closing inside a single career.

And what does it fund? Fifty-thousand-dollar grants to make proof-of-concept short films: shorts meant to prove a director can handle a feature, which is itself several unproven leaps from a $200 million tentpole. That's the missing Phase 2, and the answer to it is another short film.

To their credit, the slate is more commercial than Sundance's - heists, an action-comedy, real genre swings - and the impulse is sincere; money for emerging filmmakers is a genuinely good thing. But it's still shorts, still judged on perspective rather than box-office track record, with no mechanism connecting any of it to the top 100.

As a machine for minting top-100 female directors - its stated goal - it's the ouroboros with a budget: fund the flawed pipeline, skip proving the pipeline works, and wait for next year's report to confirm it still doesn't.

After hundreds of pages, thousands of citations, and nearly two decades of publication, Annenberg still cannot tell us where women are actually being filtered out of the blockbuster pipeline, and even more importantly, why.

That’s because the study was never designed to answer that question.

Good research follows people through a pipeline, identifies bottlenecks, tests explanations, and evaluates interventions. Until Hollywood diversity research does that, it will continue producing the same cycle: alarming headline, industry outrage, institutional response, disappointing results, then another alarming headline.

None of this means discrimination plays no role in Hollywood careers. It simply means we cannot determine its role from the evidence Annenberg presents.

The Annenberg study substitutes a simple headcount of the top 100 directors for the hard work of developing an effective theory of why and how those people got there. Until it stops relying on outcomes instead of processes, the ouroboros will keep swallowing its own tail, instead of helping the female filmmakers who want to become blockbuster directors to finally get there.

P.S. For an excellent followup, have a look at Stephen Follows new piece responding to this one, and identifying the actual pipeline: link here.

A feature film or television series has at its core only a handful of key parts.

1. The Protagonist - the person who the central problem, “agon,” or struggle happens to, and who succeeds or fails at solving it. The classic example is Chief Brody in Jaws. The shark appears, he tries to stop it, eventually succeeds, movie over.

2. The Antagonist - the person on the other side of the struggle, who opposes the protagonist, forcing them to change and grow in order to win, or fail to, in order to lose (tragedy). Hans Gruber in Die Hard is a classic example; his terror attack forces Bruce Willis to not only kill a bunch of bad guys, but to acknowledge that he’s been self-centered and foolish in his marriage.

3. A slew of supporting characters, who generally line up on one side or the other, delivering exposition, offering support, occasionally switching sides in dramatic betrayals. I really like the Belgian movie 2 Days, 1 Night where a depressed office worker has to convince her coworkers to give up their bonuses instead of voting to fire her. Her husband is an indefatigable ally and source of support, pushing her to fight to keep her job, which they desperately need.

Realistically, there are usually 2-3 really big parts in a movie, and 3-4 bigger supporting parts. You can tell by where they go on the poster.

The core game audiences play while watching stories is trying to guess what happens next. Narrative functions as a series of causes and effects, or setups and payoffs, that begins with a problem and escalates into a series of crises. The audience’s game is to identify and anticipate patterns, to guess how those causes make effects. If you’ve ever watched a movie with someone who says out loud “oh he’s the one who did it” or… “she shouldn’t sleep with him,” this is the mechanism at work.

A lot of the fun comes in guessing who among the subsidiary characters will be good or evil. The uncertainty tantalizes; who will betray or hinder the protagonist? Who’ll help them at the last minute? It’s an essential part of most good stories, and it’s a core part of why we engage with them; they’re experiments in living other lives.

But our pleasure is diminished when the guessing game is too easy.

Many television shows structure their seasons around the battle with one or several antagonists; Avon Barksdale in the Wire season one (who’s defeated, while Stringer escapes), Livia Soprano and Uncle Junior in season one of the Sopranos. The season ends when these antagonists are defeated, killed, incapacitated, or their betrayal revealed. By the end of these shows’ season one, for example, Avon and Junior are arrested, Livia’s betrayal and true villainy is revealed.

In most great narratives, there’s only one true conflict, a zero-sum agon, or struggle, around which a broad story arc revolves. In the Wire, Stringer and Avon want to stay out of prison, our hardy police officers want them in prison. In the Sopranos, Tony wants to stay boss, his uncle and mother want his power.

When that core struggle ends, the season or movie ends. The last two minutes of Jaws are two men kicking away through the ocean on a piece of flotsam. Nobody gives a shit after the shark’s dead; they came to see them kill the shark, risking death along the way, and are satisfied when it’s over.

I had a very smart screenwriting teacher who once called the core of drama “two dogs, one bone.” The dogs are the protagonist and antagonist, the bone is the thing both of them want, but only one can truly have. Identify the dogs, introduce the bone, have the dogs fight like hell over it, then make the protagonist’s win both surprising and inevitable. Inevitable because all the pieces add up, surprising because they did so in a way you didn’t expect. The joy is the ride along the way.

The great dramatist William Archer put it thus: drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.

Drama requires uncertainty.

Progressive Ideology

But there is a creeping challenge across our film and television dramaturgy; progressive ideology, in which we’re told that certain groups are inherently more oppressed, and thus more moral than others.

This sits uneasily with dramatic storytelling, particularly in mixed-race casts, for a simple reason:

Unlike drama, which requires uncertainty, progressive ideology requires moral certainty based around people’s identities.

We all know the moral totem pole that progressive ideology has constructed, with cis white hetero able bodied men at the bottom, and a trans black disabled woman at the top.

In the last decade, this inverted moral hierarchy became an unintentional guidebook for writing drama, with disastrous effects. You’ve all conducted this exercise before; you start a movie, and are presented with a group of characters. Who’s good, who’s evil, and why? Who should the protagonist trust? Who will betray them?

Have you ever immediately, unconsciously guessed the outcome solely on the character’s identity and a basic social justice template? You probably have, even if you’re unwilling to admit it. So…

Drama requires uncertainty. Progressive ideology rewards certainty. You can’t have certainty and an entertaining story.

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Activist Incentives

After the activist waves of #Oscarssowhite and #Metoo, it was very easy to get accused of an “ism” for not including a lot of diverse characters in a movie or TV show. Activists soon discovered that they could criticize both the diversity of the characters in the show, and that of the people creating the show.

A sort of strange moral calculus began to take over Hollywood, which is still mostly white. We have to have more diverse characters, but can the gang leader be black? Should the muslim man be cheating on his wife? Can the black female entrepreneur be committing fraud?

Wouldn’t that screw up the moral totem pole? Will we get fired?