(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is torching the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its new woke diversity and inclusion quotas, saying “they make me want to vomit” in an interview with PBS’s Margaret Hoover.
“Starting in 2024, films will be required to meet new inclusion standards,” Hoover told Dreyfuss. “To be eligible for the Academy Awards for Best Picture, they’ll have to have a certain percentage of actors or crew from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. What do you think of these new inclusion standards for films?”
Dreyfuss answered, “They make me vomit,” before defending artistic freedom.
“This is an art form,” the actor continued. “It’s also a form of commerce and it makes money but it’s an art. And no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is. And what we are risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences greenlighted the woke policies in 2020, which will hijack the categories in 2024. As part of the changes, all films will be required to meet two of four diversity guidelines before being considered for the Best Picture award.
Dreyfuss called out the policies for placing limits on actors.
“And I’m sorry, I don’t think that there’s a minority or a majority in the country that has to be catered to like that,” he continued. “You know, Laurence Olivier was the last white actor to play Othello. And he did it in 1965. And he did it in blackface and he played a black man, brilliantly.”
“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play The Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?” Dreyfuss concluded. “This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”
