In an official statement called “Academy Aperture 2025,” Academy CEO Dawn Hudson has announced new efforts to increase diversity in the film community, including plans for a more inclusive Oscar race.

“While the Academy has made strides, we know there is much more work to be done in order to ensure equitable opportunities across the board,” Hudson said in a statement. “The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.”

To this end, “the Academy and the Producers Guild of America (PGA) are creating a task force of industry leaders “to develop and implement new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility by July 31, 2020.”

Right away I asked myself “what exactly will this mean”?

More Academy members of color and different cultures, one presumes, but what else?

Are we talking about some kind of new Hays Code, only this time focusing on racial inclusion and positive messaging rather than matters of sexual behavior and violence and immorality, which sparked the establishment of conservative depiction standards in films starting in ‘34 and lasting until ‘66 or ’67?

Inclusion standards in terms of what? Subject matter? As in “stories that don’t reflect or represent positive attitudes and dynamics about ethnicity vs. whiteness”?

Are we talking about the Academy approving or otherwise supporting the hiring of persons of color in the casting of films and miniseries and whatnot? Are we talking about refusing Oscar recognition if this or that film doesn’t feature a certain percentage of characters of color in the stories being told?

Are we talking about a new industry-wide standard that might result in films like Mank, set in the early 40s and concerned largely with white characters, being vaguely frowned upon?

I’m just thinking out loud but what would “new representation and inclusion standards” actually mean?

A couple of hours ago I asked a couple of Academy spokespersons for some specific clarification…crickets.

Journo pally #1: “Yes, you should ask all these questions, publicly. Representing those of us who can’t.”

Journo pally #2: “All very good questions about a clear move to restore the kind of rules and censorship many of us worked very hard to sweep away in the late ’60 and early ‘70s. The days of ‘anything goes’ are coming to a close. Look at the banning of Gone With the Wind. Is everyone so delicate they can’t look at things made in the past under different circumstances and put them in historical perspective?”

Dave Chappelle‘s George Floyd riff starts at the 5:00 mark and ends at 7:30. And then it picks up again after the 8:00 mark. But in the middle of this, at 7:35, comes his Don Lemon riff, which made me laugh out loud. After describing Lemon as “that hotbed of reality,” Chappelle says he flinched when Lemon called out showbiz celebrities for not being sufficiently angry or demonstrative enough about Floyd’s murder. “This [n-word] was talkin’ about everybody…I was screamin’ at the TV, ‘I dare you to say me, [n-word]….I dare you. This is the streets talkin’ for themselves…they don’t need me right now.”

At 14:55, Chappelle calls Laura Ingraham the c-word. He also calls Staten Island “an awful place…yuk.”

The 26-minute set was filmed on Saturday, June 6 in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

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For my money Spike Lee‘s 3 Brothers short, which debuted last week on CNN, is as emotionally effective as Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix, 6.12). After watching it two or three days ago I saw the below photo of Muhammud Ali and the quote that goes with it, and that got me also. What a magnificent figure of bravery Ali was…such a champion in all respects.

The tragic experience of Bill Nunn‘s “Radio Raheem”, who was choked and killed by the bulls in Lee’s Do The Right Thing (’89), was of course a forerunner of the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd.

Raheem’s fate was based upon the real-life Michael Stewart, who died in the custody of NYC police in 1983 after being arrested for spray painting a subway wall.

Do The Right Thing is about a cultural conflict in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, between two or three Italian pizzeria guys and their African American customers.

Raheem’s ghetto blaster is a trigger. In the view of Raheem and friends, assaulting passersby with ear-splitting music was a celebration of identity and culture, but to most New Yorkers back then (and I’m speaking as an ex-resident who lived in Manhattan fom ’78 to ’83) ghetto blasters were a scourge.

Is it racist to say that those obnoxious, suitcase-sized devices made life occasionally hellish for Manhattanites, and especially for Central Park visitors on warm weekends? Because it’s true. A friend once told me about a kid on a bike who was blasting sounds near an open pasture in southern Central Park, and somehow the kid lost his balance and the blaster fell and shattered and was silent. A few people leapt to their feet and started cheering.

Posted on 8.13.12: “It’s still Jaws. It’s still that mid-level, beach-read, good-enough-but-don’t-get-carried-away movie that made all kinds of money, blah blah. I watched about 40 minutes’ worth [of the 2012 Bluray] and found it fine. It’s clever and crafty and obviously engrossing. But it’s just okay. I can’t for the life of me understand why people hop and down about this thing and go ‘wow, great film!’

“At the very beginning the young blonde girl who’s about to get eaten is running along the beach with a drunk guy following, and rather than act like any normal or semi-normal human being on the planet earth, she takes her clothes off the Spielberg way. She yanks her sweatshirt off and drops it on a grassy sand dune to the right. Then she runs a bit more and pulls one of her sneakers off and throws it to the left. And then the other sneaker. And then her jeans. By the time she’s running into the water she’s scattered her clothes over a 100-foot stretch of beach.

“Nobody would do that. They just wouldn’t. In the real world even a drunk girl would drop her clothes in a rough pile of some kind, but not in Spielbergland. Spielberg always finds some way of pulling you out of a film with unnatural human behavior.”

A couple of days ago the below copy appeared within Abid Rahman’s 6.9 Hollywood Reporter story about HBO Max [temporarily] removing Gone With The Wind from the streaming service. The erroneous info was quickly deleted.

Mistakes happen, but this was a whopper. The first half of Gone With The Wind takes place before and during the Civil War, of course, and the second half in the war’s aftermath. And who ever heard of a plantation “in” Atlanta?

The exact 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre happened just under two weeks ago — 5.31 and 6.1. It’s nonetheless astounding that in the wake of the nationwide George Floyd marches, Donald Trump has slated a political rally in Tulsa, of all places, and of all dates on 6.19 or “Juneteenth“, an African American holiday that celebrates the end of slavery.

The symbolism couldn’t be plainer. Trump is more or less announcing the following: “To honor the 99th anniversary of the mob murder of dozens of black citizens in 1921 Tulsa, I will stage my first post-COVID shutdown rally in this very same city, thus ensuring that my racist bumblefuck supporters will attend in droves…you know what we’re saying and why we’re gathering in Tulsa…long live the greatness of redhat America!”

President Trump is holding his next hate rally on Juneteenth … in Tulsa, the site of the 1921 race massacre.

The worst single incident of racial violence in US history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. pic.twitter.com/76SoqDmIZx

— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) June 11, 2020

…for being Celeb Virtue Signallers. Especially Tennisballhead.

Is there any social ill that celebrities can’t fix, or at least point the way toward fixing?

Seriously: When I was young there were times when I tolerated or winked at racist words, jokes, stereotypes, etc. I’m very sorry for having looked the other way when this happened (and I’m talking maybe four or five times), but I will never allow that shit in my presence again.

Speaking as a daily columnist who is genuinely terrified of SJW wokester cancel-culture types, I take total responsibility for the content of Hollywood Elsewhere over the past 16 years, although I am greviously sorry and do humbly apologize for…oh, six or seven columns that I didn’t express or sculpt in quite the right way. And anything else that landed with a thud.

I’m imperfect. Sometimes it comes out wrong. And I hate using more words than necessary. but I’m mostly an X-factor, hard-working, cut-through-the-daily-bullshit samurai truth-teller, and I truly believe in decency and compassion for all. Except for cats who pee on my pillow.

Speaking as a life-long cat lover, I can say with authority that some cats are on the dumb or weird side. One out of several hundred, I mean.

If none-too-bright cats are unhappy or freaked about some kind of confining situation, for example, they’ll sometimes do anything they can to escape, even at their own peril. Or they’ll take revenge upon the person they think is responsible.

Here are four feline incidents that I personally experienced, and one that happened to a friend:

(1) A woman I knew was driving with an anguished male cat on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The weather was cold, a mild snowstorm was blowing, and her car was surrounded by a fair amount of traffic. She was going the usual highway speed. For some reason she leaned over and rolled down the driver-side window, and the cat immediately leapt out.

(2) My ex-wife Maggie and I had a calico cat who was accustomed to outdoor access, and who became extremely upset when we moved into an 8th floor high-rise apartment. The first night we moved in the cat climbed onto a waist-high balcony wall that overlooked the eight-story drop. I put him inside the apartment as this obviously seemed risky. Later that night he got out and jumped. We’d loved him, petted him, fed him, etc. Go figure.

(3) In the late 90s I was driving down Franklin Avenue with a cat who couldn’t handle being in moving cars. Jett and Dylan were with me. The cat was howling and freaking, and at one point jumped onto my shoulders and took a serious milkshake dump all over my neck and onto my blue workshirt. I remember the smell filling the car and the kids screaming with laughter.

(4) My sister and I knew that our excitable cat hated water, so we decided to take him with us on a short rowboat trip to the middle of a pond. As a training exercise. We waited until we were 30 or 40 feet out and then let him go. He looked around, assessed the situation, jumped into the pond and swam ashore.

(5) A girlfriend and I were sharing an apartment on Boston’s Park Drive. Her male cat, Tom, was bunking with us. I love cats but Tom was extremely hostile to me — the only cat I’ve run into who was this negative. One night we came back from a restaurant and found that Tom had peed on my sleeping pillow on our conjugal bed. That was it. Over the next day or two we found someone who was willing to take him.