It’s been touted as one of the most open Academy Awards in recent memory, but whoever wins on Sunday we already know who the loser is. The award for worst performing sector of society goes to … and no surprises here: white masculinity. This particular demographic has already been identified as the problem with the movie industry in general and the academy in particular, in the wake of both #OscarsSoWhite (which campaigned for more representation of people of colour in film) and the current #MeToo/Time’s Up movement (against sexual harassment and gender inequality in the industry). Looking at this year’s best picture nominees, that sentiment appears to have carried through into the movies themselves.

Frontrunner The Shape of Water, for example, is set in cold war America but mirrors the current political zeitgeist uncannily. Its central characters are all marginalised members of society: Sally Hawkins plays a mute cleaner, her best friends are an African-American woman and a gay artist, and she forms a romantic bond with a humanoid amphibian creature (he’s from the Amazon, so technically he’s a Latino). But it’s clear who the real monster of the piece is: Michael Shannon’s sour, sadistic, ramrod-straight FBI agent. He essentially represents the postwar American patriarchy keeping these women and minorities down.

The white, male establishment is the enemy across the board this year. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Frances McDormand (the favourite for best actress) wages a one-woman war against her local police department, personified by Woody Harrelson and his racist deputy, Sam Rockwell. In Get Out, Daniel Kaluuya is imperilled by a seemingly respectable white community (of both sexes) that turns out to prey on African Americans with impunity. Call Me By Your Name is a story of white men rejecting heterosexual norms, and Lady Bird is a female-centric teen story in which the only significant males are the heroine’s two boyfriends (both douchebags, to some extent) and her father, who is unemployed and battling depression. Most emblematic of all, perhaps, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, in which Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a 1950s fashion designer. He is the epitome of toxic masculinity: domineering, intimidating, complacent. He bosses women about, he dresses them like dolls, he parades them like automatons, and he heartlessly discards them once he’s done with them. He’d make a great movie director.

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Even among the exceptions to the rule, the apparent white-male problem is consciously addressed. Steven Spielberg’s The Post, for example, would have been a male-dominated newsroom thriller in decades past (see 1977 Oscar-winner All The President’s Men). To bring it up to date, the screenplay incorporates a central, powerful female character into the story: publisher Katherine Graham, played by Meryl Streep.

Darkest Hour deploys a similar strategy. The British parliament in the 1940s is the epitome of a white, male bastion, but Joe Wright’s Churchill drama brings two key women into the narrative: his wife, Clemmie (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), and his nervous new secretary (Lily James), both of whom provide some human-scale emotion to offset the big politics. That leaves Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk the only best picture nominee with no female or minority roles to speak of, though it hardly comes across as a shining advertisement for undiluted white masculinity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer, both given Oscar nominations for their performances in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

That these movies reflect current sentiments is unsurprising, but they also mirror the academy’s own problems with white masculinity. In 2012, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that the academy’s 5,765 voting members were 94% white and 77% male. Their median age was 62, just 14% of members were under 50, and a sizeable proportion had not worked on a movie in decades. That year, the only actors of colour among the nominations were Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (who won best supporting actress) in The Help. All nine of the nominated best pictures were directed by white men, and they took all five best director slots (The Artist was the big winner that year). By 2015, the situation had become untenable: no actors of colour were nominated for the second year running – inspiring the #OscarsSoWhite movement, boycotts and reams of damaging publicity.

In response to this existential threat, former academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs unveiled “an ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”. The academy took in 683 new members in 2016 and a further 774 last year. Of last year’s intake, 39% were women, and 30% were people of colour. In addition, voting membership was limited to a 10-year term, subject to renewal three times before lifetime membership is granted. Last October, in response to the flood of sexual harassment allegations against him, the academy also voted to expel Harvey Weinstein – the most visible monster of white, male privilege.

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“It just shows that a very simple act of will by people who can make those decisions can make change happen very quickly,” says Gaylene Gould, head of cinema and events at the British Film Institute. The BFI is initiating its own changes, she points out. It has drawn up a set of diversity and inclusion targets for its partners and funding recipients: a 50-50 gender balance, 20% from ethnic minority backgrounds, 9% LGBTQ and 7% film-makers with a disability. In addition, this month, British film, television and games industries signed up to a set of anti-bullying and harassment guidelines. As from next year, British entries to the Bafta film awards will have to comply with them to be eligible for nomination. “It’s going to be interesting to keep an eye on how that might stir things up and let other voices rise to the surface,” says Gould. “It does feel like interventions need to be made to crack that crust that sits over Hollywood.”

The academy’s new influx has helped fix its image problem and, arguably, prompted a more diverse spread of nominations this year. But it could also be dividing the institution into two camps: an old guard (mostly older, white and male), and a new guard of younger, more female and diverse members, many of whom have come from technical disciplines. Their ideas of what constitutes Oscar-worthy cinema could differ. Some of the new guard see it as their mission to shake things up, and to recognise people and movies that might previously have been overlooked. In turn, some of the old guard worry the academy is recruiting too many inexperienced professionals just to beef up its diversity statistics.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kristin Scott Thomas as ‘Clemmie’ Churchill and Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s film, Darkest Hour. Photograph: Allstar/Working Title Films

The best picture nominees could be seen to reflect this split. Some movies champion relatively fresh talent and up-to-date, establishment-challenging stories: Get Out, Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name. Others are more traditional Oscar fare: serious, large-scale historical drama featuring familiar names: The Post gives Meryl Streep her 21st acting nomination.

“I loved Get Out but it’s shocking to me it got nominated,” says one veteran academy voter (a white male). In decades past, he recalls, the academy was dominated by actors, a sizeable proportion of them senior citizens. “So the rumour, at least, was that a lot of the older folks really didn’t care and they turned to their kids and said, ‘What did you think was the best film?’ So we saw a lot of strangeness. But now, with the diversification, a film like Get Out gets in.”

A similar old guard/new guard rift could also be detected in the acting categories. Critic Caryn James noted the contrast between showier turns, such as Gary Oldman’s Churchill, and Allison Janney in I, Tonya, and subtler performances such as those of Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, , Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out or Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird. “We’re definitely seeing an influx of new talent,” says James. “The big, old-fashioned, blustery performances usually win, but this year, there was room for a little more nuance. It’s hard to guess how much of that is because the Academy membership has broadened and how much they’ve been kind of embarrassed into it because of things like #OscarsSoWhite. I suspect it’s a bit of both.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, received five Oscar nominations. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Tastes don’t necessarily skew along old/new lines. An old, white, male voter says he loved The Shape Of Water but also Lady Bird. A newly recruited, 40-something British-Asian voter says, “I would love to see Gary Oldman win. What a great actor. His performance was excellent.” This member was “stunned and humbled” to be invited to join last year, he says, and surprised: “I was told members were from a selected demographic of people: old, white, middle-class folk. But in my short experience of being part of the Academy, I have met a huge diversity of people who seem to come from all walks of life. I think people need to recognise that it is changing.”

Even if 2018 goes down as a turning point, the battle has not been won. For one thing, last year the academy elected a new president to replace Boone Isaacs: cinematographer John Bailey – a 75-year-old white man. Bailey has expressed his support for the academy’s diversity agenda, but his election was seen by some as “a victory for the more conservative wing of the 54-person board, which feels that the board has become too activist in recent years”.

For another thing, the awards have not been handed out yet. The old, white male order has by no means been overturned. Gary Oldman is overwhelming favourite for best actor, for example, and some of those younger contenders will go home empty-handed. As Churchill said, this is only “the end of the beginning”. The Academy’s diversity drive of the past two years has only increased the total proportion of female members from 25% to 28%, and people of colour from 8% to 13%. In its 90-year history, the Academy has still only nominated five women and five people of colour for best director.Real Hollywood change has to happen at a structural level and there’s only so much the Oscars can do. But if Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig or Get Out’s Jordan Peele picks up a statuette, it will send an important signal. And in movies, presentation is everything.