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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't they be judging the actual art, acting, directing, etc., and completely disregard the genders, ethnicity, and race of the actors? Wouldn't that be the best for such an award?

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It's an unspoken foundation of far leftist thought that people don't have beliefs, they have influences. Any art you make is merely an expression of your race, sex, sexual orientation, et cetera. For decades academics have been saying that all white people are subconsciously, inescapably racist. This is the result of that foundational belief.

Well that is something that is very strawman like. However you don’t;t need “far leftist thought” to examine this. The academy are well known to have tastes and favour some types of movies over others.

The oscars has consistently ignored SF/F, favoured films about history. To the point that some movie makers directly pander to the academy’s tastes in an attempt to get a Oscar nom.

The academy knows that there taste is out of touch with the American people because the movies that gets Oscar noms are less and less like the movies that American people like. This is a part of their attempt to fix this.

It's not a strawman since it is exactly that which is stated by many influential leftist writers.

Could you give some names?

It's basically the idea of dialectical materialism. The very popular book White Fragility is a great example of this thought process.

Good so it will be simple for you to find a quote that supports this from the book.

The counter argument is that the Academy reports to no one but themselves and can set whatever standard they want for their own award show.

They should be but if you look at the history they haven’t been. This is an effort to correct for this.

There was a precedent: blind auditions in orchestra. Results were rather predictable.

Predictable in what way? Last year there was some discussion about the correctness of the usual take-away of the original blind-audition study: https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/

Indeed, and now the Association of American Orchestras wants to end blind auditions because they don't get enough black people that way ️

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

https://americanorchestras.org/images/stories/diversity/Raci...

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