article: Host Neil Patrick Harris opened the ceremony with a joke about honouring "Hollywood's best and whitest. Sorry, brightest". So why has the repeat situation created such a toxic row, with prominent figures Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith and Michael Moore leading a boycott, and others like George Clooney and Oscar winner Lupita Nyongo speaking out? And what are the possible "dramatic steps" that Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) president Cheryl Boone Isaacs has promised the organisation will take to review its operations? Film critic Tim Robey believes a festering wound has grown since both the director and star of the Martin Luther King biopic Selma were ignored - despite great critical acclaim - last year. "There was a feeling going round that because they [Academy voters] had given awards to Twelve Years a Slave the year before, for some reason they thought they were 'off the hook'. So Selma got a terrible handling, really." Profile of the average Oscar winner How to win an Oscar How to become an Academy member Oscars 2016: Nominations list David Oyelewo, who didn't get nominated for his lead performance in Selma, revealed on Monday that Isaacs called him in for a meeting after last year's awards "to talk about what went wrong then", though it's not known what specific ideas they discussed. The quickest fix would be to get an approved panel to draw up a longlist of nominations for voters to choose from, as many book prizes do. However, it would open up new arguments about who is on the panel and the controversial issue of affirmative action and so-called "positive discrimination". It also doesn't guarantee who gets on the shortlist. Both Tim Robey and Tim Gray, awards editor of Variety magazine in Hollywood, say making the shortlists longer would help. If this year's Best Picture shortlist had featured the 10 films allowed instead of just eight, it might have included the hotly tipped Creed or Straight Outta Compton. Diversifying the overwhelmingly white, male and over-50 membership has been much discussed and has been attempted in earlier recruitment drives. Bafta in the UK broadened its membership criteria a decade ago to attract younger people from newer digital and online creative industries - though that hasn't really resulted in much more diverse nominations. But Ampas is an honour society in which experienced industry professionals nominate others in categories for membership and awards. Actors nominate the acting shortlists, directors nominate directors and so on, before voting is opened up for the final winners. Trying to stop retirees from voting or at least nominating is one possibility, but it would mean an acrimonious internal fight. However, anyone who gets nominated for an Academy Award is automatically eligible for membership. Tim Robey says: "It would be a much more elegant solution to the problem to nominate the worthy performances. Once you're nominated you become a member of the club." This would still take time to feed through to making a notable difference in voting results though. Tim Gray suggests releasing information on how many votes each
summary: Last year they were making jokes about the lack of any black or Latino performers in the acting categories at the Academy Awards ceremony.