In response to #OscarsSoWhite, some members were shifted to “emeritus status.” Illustration by Golden Cosmos

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences occupies a squat nineteen-seventies building on Wilshire Boulevard, surrounded by car dealerships. On January 14th of last year, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy’s president, arrived at 2:30 A.M., several hours before she was to announce the eighty-eighth annual Oscar nominations at a press conference. Boone Isaacs, a soft-spoken woman in her sixties, with bangs and chunky glasses, has held her post since 2013. She’d arrived early to get camera-ready and to practice saying the names; the previous year, she had accidentally caused an Internet sensation when she referred to the cinematographer Dick Pope as “Dick Poop.”

The Academy’s first black president and third female president (after Bette Davis and Fay Kanin), Boone Isaacs has presided over a tumultuous era. In 2015, all the acting nominees were white, and the civil-rights drama “Selma” received no nods for its cast or for its director, Ava DuVernay. In response, an activist named April Reign tweeted, “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” launching a hashtag movement that laid Hollywood’s diversity problems at the Academy’s feet. Boone Isaacs was desperately hoping to avoid a repeat in 2016. As she sat having her makeup done, a staff member gravely handed her the packet containing the list of names. Not only were the acting nominees again all white, but “Straight Outta Compton,” about the gangsta-rap group N.W.A., was noticed only for the work of its white screenwriters, and the “Rocky” sequel “Creed,” which had a black director and star, received a single nomination—for Sylvester Stallone.

Just before 5 A.M., Boone Isaacs took the elevator down to the Academy’s in-house movie theatre, which has a plush red curtain framed by two jumbo statuettes. She and the actor John Krasinski read the names to a crowd of bleary-eyed reporters. A lifelong public-relations professional, she kept her tone upbeat, but, as she told me later, “I just knew it was going to be tough from a P.R. standpoint.” It was. April Reign immediately revived her hashtag, which went viral. Jada Pinkett Smith, whose husband, Will Smith, failed to receive a nomination for “Concussion,” announced on Facebook that she would boycott the ceremony. Spike Lee also vowed to boycott, writing, on Instagram, “40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can’t Act?! WTF!!” The following week, at the King Legacy Awards, where Boone Isaacs received the Rosa Parks Humanitarian Award, the actor David Oyelowo (who played Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Selma”) interrupted his prepared remarks to say, “The Academy has a problem.”

That same day, Boone Isaacs released a statement saying that she was “heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion” and promised “big changes.” Diversity had been feverishly discussed within the Academy since at least 2012, when the Los Angeles Times reported that the nearly six-thousand-person membership was ninety-four per cent white and seventy-seven per cent male, with a median age of sixty-two. (New members need two letters of sponsorship to get in; the annual three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar dues provide admittance to free screenings, which members are expected to attend so that they can make nominations and vote for the awards.) In late 2015, Boone Isaacs announced an initiative called A2020, which had the goal of making the Academy twice as diverse by the end of the decade. When the #OscarsSoWhite fiasco started spinning out of control, she decided to fast-track the project. “It became apparent that doing business as usual wasn’t going to be enough,” she said.

On January 21st, the board of governors met for an emergency session in the Academy’s seventh-floor conference room. The board is made up of three representatives from each of the organization’s seventeen branches. “It’s just like being a member of the P.T.A.,” a screenwriter told me—if your P.T.A. included Tom Hanks and Annette Bening. The board unanimously approved a plan to diversify the voting body quickly by aggressively recruiting new members while shifting others to “emeritus status.” Voting rights would be granted only to members who had been active in the industry in the previous ten years, with the exception of those with credits spanning three decades and anyone who had ever been nominated for an Oscar. In other words, if you had two acting credits in the Eisenhower era, start packing for the ice floe.

News of the plan was met with praise, including from Ava DuVernay, who tweeted, “Shame is a helluva motivator.” But a backlash soon emerged. Since the Academy had not released a list of who would be demoted, old-timers looked at their IMDb pages and panicked. In the days following the announcement, the Hollywood Reporter published a series of guest columns by irate Academy veterans: the director Stephen Verona (“The Lords of Flatbush,” 1974) was “flabbergasted and then outraged”; the producer David Kirkpatrick (“Reds,” 1981; “Terms of Endearment,” 1983) accused the Academy of “exchanging purported racism with ageism”; Patricia Resnick, who wrote the feminist classic “9 to 5” (1980), complained about potentially being “booted into ‘emeritus’ status and replaced by younger members” as a sop to help the Academy deal with its “publicity nightmare.” Resnick believed that the Academy was taking the heat for a problem endemic to the whole industry. “I’d really like to see them use their muscle to push the studios to include more diverse voices,” she told me.

As anyone who has seen “Sunset Boulevard” knows, no anxiety is as pervasive in Hollywood as the fear of obsolescence. “A lot of us felt blindsided,” the visual-effects artist John Van Vliet told me. In the seventies, Van Vliet was drafted out of film school by Industrial Light & Magic, where he worked on “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Now sixty-two and semi-retired, he said, “Once you get into your fifties, you’re pretty disposable.” Van Vliet was in the middle of reviewing DVD screeners before casting his Oscar votes, a process he estimated would take a hundred and twenty hours. “The Academy is essentially asking us to give them three weeks of labor, and then they’re going to take our results, put them into a ceremony, and sell it,” he said, referring to the seventy-five million dollars that the organization earns from the television broadcast. “Then they’re turning around and kicking us in the teeth.”

Like Hollywood’s best sagas—“Star Wars,” “The Godfather”—the Oscars often play out as a drama of generational conflict. Daniel Smith-Rowsey, a film historian, has referred to the latest shakeup as “the third purge,” following two previous industry-wide talent overhauls. The first occurred in the twenties, as the rise of talkies swept scores of mugging mustache-twirlers and big-eyed ingénues to the sidelines. This shift coincided with the founding of the Academy, in 1927, by Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, who hoped to preëmpt the unionization of studio craftsmen by concocting an organization that could mediate labor disputes. The bestowing of “awards of merit” was an afterthought, and in May, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Academy’s first president, Douglas Fairbanks, dispensed the trophies in fifteen minutes. That year, for the only time, there was a prize for title writing. “The Jazz Singer,” the silent era’s dinosaur-killing asteroid, was given a special prize, as it seemed unfair to put it in competition with the silents. By the next year, the Best Picture contenders were all talkies.