200 personalities of French cinema including Omar Sy, Bertrand Tavernier, Céline Sciamma or Agnès Jaoui are calling for a "deep reform" of the Académie des César, in a forum published on Monday evening on the Le Monde website. The signatories consider insufficient the changes promised by its president Alain Terzian to remedy its "elitist and closed" functioning.
In an interview with the Journal du dimanche, Alain Terzian announced measures to establish parity within the Academy, of which only 35% of the members are women, promising to lead a "cultural revolution". Measures that the Academy confirmed to want to initiate, in a statement published Monday evening, starting with its board of directors which must become joint by the end of the year.
“Opacity of the accounts” and lack of democracy
"We are delighted with these changes to come, but they seem insufficient to us," protested the signatories of a forum published in the process, on the site of Le Monde. They complain, although being members of the Academy of Caesar, to have "no voice in the chapter nor in the functioning of the academy and the association (which governs it, note), nor in the course of the ceremony ".
Their main criticisms: "dysfunctions", "opacity of accounts" generating fantasies, and statutes which "have not evolved for a very long time" and are still based on "cooptation".
"Elite and closed system"
As for the promises of parity, "it would again be a system of cooptation, a vestige of an era that we would like to be over, that of an elitist and closed system", they denounce, claiming to be able to vote directly to be able to elect their representatives, as is the case for the Oscar and the Bafta (United Kingdom).
The Academy was created in 1975 by the journalist and producer Georges Cravenne, who designated a college of founders rewarded by an Oscar like Claude Berri, Claude Lelouch, Michel Legrand or Costa-Gavras.
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