The potential to change the film industry.
With Jordan Peele becoming the first ever African-American recipient of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, this year's Oscars made history but Peele's win wasn't the only milestone. Mudbound cinematographer Rachel Morrison became the first woman to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Achievement in Cinematography and the
89-year-old screenwriter of Call Me By Your Name, James Ivory, became the oldest Oscar winner of all time.
This being said, despite these positive developments, various people have been critical of the lack of diversity among this year's nominees, and in the industry as a whole.
Afte winning the Best Actress Award for her role in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Frances McDormand used the farewell of her acceptance speech to introduce the public to the phrase inclusion rider.
After the star of Fargo and Burn After Reading said those words, plenty of people were curious about what they actually meant.
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Here's her speech in full along with an explainer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-86vgvZGMs4
An inclusion rider is a clause that an actor can insist be inserted in their contract that requires cast and crew on a film to meet a certain level of diversity.
The person that invented the concept, communications professor Stacy Smith, explained the concept in
Vanity Fair: "an inclusion rider is a provision added to actors’ contracts to ensure that casting on productions is more representative. It stipulates that in small and supporting roles, characters should reflect the world we live in. That includes 50-percent gender parity, 40-percent inclusion for people of color, five percent L.G.B.T.Q., and 20 percent disabled."
The concept was first explored during a TED talk in 2016. Having examined the data on diversity in US-produced films, Smith discovered that casting was not representative of the population as a whole and proposed that the inclusion rider could be part of the solution.
Speaking with
The Guardian, Smith elaborates on the concept: “The typical feature film has about 40 to 45 speaking characters in it. I would argue that only 8 to 10 of those characters are actually relevant to the story. The remaining 30 or so roles, there’s no reason why those minor roles can’t match or reflect the demography of where the story is taking place. An equity rider by an A-lister in their contract can stipulate that those roles reflect the world in which we actually live."
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