From diversity quotas to dumping of White actors: Inside Hollywood's fear wokeism is the END
Hollywood always had its shares of hits and misses when it comes to holding against the strong tide of a new cultural wave. And, the latest one seems to be being woke which has gained momentum, particularly in the last few years. While directors and producers have been doing everything possible to balance both White and Blacks getting jobs, it appears the big bad world of Hollywood is crumbling down- all thanks to the minorities.
The year 2015 saw the hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite” which apparently kick-started the new wave as the Internet gave everyone the power to speak up. 2016 and 2017 saw the “#MeToo movement” and then came the summer of 2020 that saw a paradigm shift after George Floyd’s gruesome death. A new blog called Common Sense has hinted that being woke might be the death of Hollywood as several White writers, or producers or directors are getting dumped only to favor the people of color. The blog hints that the new shift might end in a class-action lawsuit, as many popular shows or movies have tanked.
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Jordan Peele, who is best known for his horror movies 'Get Out' and 'Us’, is probably the only filmmaker, who earlier admitted to refusing to cast white actors. In 2019, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “'I don't see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie. Not that I don't like white dudes, but I've seen that movie.” Kevin Parker, a talent manager, told Kiefer and Savodnik from the blog that Hollywood was not shifting towards diversity because that was the right thing to do- it was doing so because it was profitable. “This whole diversity thing—it's about money. It's good business to tell more stories from different perspectives, and that's all this really is,” he said.
One of the latest examples comes in the form of the ‘Sex and the City’ reboot ‘And Just Like That’. While the original show displayed the shamelessness of the characters, the reboot mainly focused on racial tensions, and sexual and gender identities. ‘And Just Like That’ writer Keli Goff told Deadline, “I think the only thing worse than a lack of diversity is faux diversity or diversity for diversity’s sake”, adding, “You never know until you get started [on a project] because all of us have been in those situations where someone wants to hire us but then nobody cares what we have to say.”
Hollywood has always pushed its boundaries and keeping in mind the new woke culture, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (RAISE) in September 2020. This aimed at not only producers registering the detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie but the film also had to meet their diversity standards. According to the blog Common Sense, Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama 'The White Lotus’, said, “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things. If you voice things in a certain way, it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as a misogynist.”
According to Irish Times, Bernardine Evaristo, who was the first black woman to win the Booker in 2019, gave her two cents on being woke. She asserted that "to be ‘woke' means striving to make society more equal and less discriminatory, so how can you despise it? Yet the term ‘woke’ is now being vilified, just as feminism was.” While earlier, a majority of the money came from TV shows, and old Hollywood movies, streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon have completely changed the game.
