With just over two weeks to go before France’s equivalent of the Oscars, the entire board of the César Academy, which organizes the awards, resigned Thursday night, after around 400 of the country’s leading filmmakers and actors said in an open letter that its leadership was dysfunctional.

The academy worked in ways that were “a vestige of an era that we would like to be over, that of an elitist and closed system,” the signees wrote in the newspaper Le Monde.

Like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the César Academy is made up of people who work in the movie business. But its members can only vote for the awards the academy hands out, not for the organization’s leadership.

“Why can’t the 4,700 members of the academy vote to elect their representatives, as is the case at the Oscars, BAFTAs and European Academy of Cinema?” the letter said.