Cheryl Boone Isaacs: The face of Oscars equality – or a racist organisation?

The academy president is a trailblazer for black filmmakers. It’s a shame the awards she presides over haven’t kept up

The academy president is a trailblazer for black filmmakers. It’s a shame the awards she presides over haven’t kept up.

When David Oyelowo took the stage at a gala event in Los Angeles this week, he did not mince his words. Lamenting the lack of black performers among the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards, the British actor noted that The Force Awakens, 2015’s highest-grossing film, had a black star, and was knocked from atop the US box office chart by Ride Along 2, which has two. He added: “The biggest TV show on the planet is led by black people: Empire.”

What went without saying was that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself has, for the first time in its history, a black president: Cheryl Boone Isaacs, whom Oyelowo was there to present with an award named after the civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In his remarks, he praised Boone Boone Isaacs even as he reproached her organisation. “We need to support Cheryl,” Oyelowo said. “But we must make our voice heard.”

That the academy should face such a furore during her tenure had left its president “heartbroken”, she admitted in a statement released the same evening. Few have done more to promote inclusion at the Oscars than Boone Isaacs, a veteran movie publicist who pledged, when she was elected three years ago, to bring greater diversity to the academy’s membership.

In her first awards season as president, the Oscar for Best Picture went to 12 Years a Slave, a film written by, directed by and starring black people. Black performers were nominated in three of the four acting categories. But in 2015 and again this year, all 20 nominated actors were white. “For 20 opportunities to celebrate actors of colour, actresses of colour, to be missed last year is one thing,” Oyelowo said. “For that to happen again this year is unforgivable.”

After Oyelowo missed out on a nomination for the Martin Luther King biopic Selma last year, Boone Isaacs invited him to her office to discuss the issue. In the months that followed, the academy welcomed more than 300 new members, bringing its total voter membership to 6,261 (until Boone Isaacs’ presidency, the annual intake averaged about 100). Among them were black actors including Oyelowo, the comedian Kevin Hart, Straight Outta Compton director F Gary Gray, and the musicians John Legend and Common, who won Selma’s sole Oscar for their song “Glory”.

About half the employees hired by the academy in the past four years are reportedly black or ethnic minorities. The last two Oscar hosts were a gay woman, Ellen Degeneres, and a gay man, Neil Patrick Harris. This year the ceremony will be hosted by Chris Rock. The director Spike Lee, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in November, praised Boone Isaacs at the time for having “a mission, a plan to diversify the Academy and move it into the 21st century”.

Yet in spite of her efforts, Boone Isaacs has no control over what or whom academy voters nominate. This year, diverse performers and directors from acclaimed films such as Beasts of No Nation, Creed and Compton were overlooked. Now Lee has said he will not attend the “lily white” Oscars ceremony on 28 February. Will Smith, whose Golden Globe-nominated turn in Concussion failed to earn him an Oscar nomination, and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith intend to boycott the event.

Oscar nominees are chosen by voters in their academy branches: the actors branch picks the acting shortlists, the editors branch picks the Best Editing shortlist, and so on. (The exception is the Best Picture category, in which every member can vote.) Once the separate branches have selected the nominees, all 6,261 Academy members vote to decide the winners.

The ceremony throws an annual spotlight on what is an industry-wide diversity problem. Awards season is a visible symptom, not the root cause. In response to the controversy, Boone Isaacs has promised “dramatic steps” to diversify the academy and its awards – measures that may include widening the acting categories from five nominees to as many as 10 in future years. “This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes,” she said.

Born Cheryl Boone in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1949, Boone Isaacs comes from a middle-class background: her mother a housewife, her father a postal worker. As a child, she had ambitions to be a musical comedy star. “But my relatives said, ‘Oh yeah, what part are you going to play? You’re not as pretty as Lena Horne, and you can’t sing as good as Ella [Fitzgerald],’” she told author Mollie Gregory for her 2003 book Women Who Run the Show, about Hollywood’s female executives. For her parents, Boone Isaacs added, “the goal was to get the kids in college, to achieve academically, not be a performer”.

After attending Whittier College in Los Angeles, she worked briefly as a flight attendant for Pan Am before switching careers, aged 25. Her brother Ashley Boone, already a rising film executive, would go on to be the first African-American president of a major studio. The siblings had an agreement: he would give her all the advice she needed, but he would never help her to get a job.

Soon enough, however, Boone Isaacs was hired as a publicist on the second-biggest sci-fi film of 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Her brother, then head of marketing at 20th Century Fox, was hard at work on Star Wars, the biggest sci-fi film of that or any other year.) A stint as publicity director for the Ladd Company led to 13 years at Paramount, where she was eventually named executive vice-president of Worldwide Publicity, pulling the strings of promotional campaigns for the consecutive Best Picture winners Forrest Gump (1994) and Braveheart (1995).

As Boone Isaacs was rising through the ranks, she encountered many other women but precious few minorities. “Being an African-American woman didn’t hold me back exactly,” she said. “I guess if I’d been a white female I would have moved faster, and if I’d been a white male I would have moved twice as fast.”

As the president of theatrical marketing for New Line from 1997 to 1999, she was the first black woman to head a studio marketing department. Today, she runs her own movie marketing firm, CBI Enterprises, and lives in LA with her husband, the producer Stanley Isaacs.

She joined the academy in 1987 and filled each of its five other elected offices before being chosen by its board of governors as the 35th president, in 2013. Not only the first African-American in the role, she was also only the third woman – after the screenwriter Fay Kanin (1979 to 1983) and Bette Davis, president for a mere two months in 1941. Popular with the membership, she has since been re-elected for two further annual terms of a possible four.

Tim Gray, the awards editor of Variety, says: “It’s good for the academy to have a black woman president, but that’s not why she was elected. She has always been liked and respected in the industry. The job of a studio publicist is to keep peace with all the different factions – film-makers, agents, studio people – which also makes her perfect for her job with the academy.”

Diversity aside, the other major project being undertaken by the academy is a $300m (£211m) museum, due to open in LA next year. As its members prepare to look back fondly on the academy’s past, Boone Isaacs is preparing them to embrace the future.

Boone Isaacs: A Life in Brief

Born: 1949 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Family: The youngest of four children. Her father, Ashley, was a postal worker and her mother a housewife. Married to film producer Stanley Isaacs and has one child.

Education: Political science degree, Whittier College.

Career: Pan Am cabin crew in 1971. Joined Columbia Pictures as publicist in 1977. Became first black woman to head a studio marketing department at New Line Cinema in 1997. Elected academy president in July 2013.