David Mamet: Oscars' Inclusive Best Picture Eligibility Rules are “Fascist Totalitarianism”

David Mamet was a guest at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to talk about his recently released Hollywood memoir ‘Everywhere an Oink Oink.’

The playwright and filmmaker’s latest gripe has to do with D.E.I. in Hollywood and the recent “inclusive” Oscar eligibility rules for the Best Picture category.

D.E.I. is garbage. It’s fascist totalitarianism. The idea that the Academy “can’t give you a stupid fucking statue unless you have seven percent of this, eight percent of that … it’s intrusive. The [film industry] has little business improving everybody’s racial understanding as does the fire department. There’s no room for individual initiative.

The Academy of Motion Pictures instituted these rules for Oscar-eligible films to help advance the representation of “LGBTQ+, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people”. If a film does not hit the mandatory quotas then it wouldn’t be able to contend for Best Picture.

Mamet went on to describe the film industry as being in the late stages of the “growth, maturity, decay, and death” cycle that “happens to everything that’s organic.”

Mamet, who hasn’t directed a film in over 15 years, says he’s been pushed out of Hollywood less by his politics than by his age. “Nobody’s going to pay me a lot of money anymore,” Mamet said. “Nobody’s going to let me have a lot of fun.”

Whether you agree with his politics, or not, his industry absence is a real shame given that Mamet, a gifted artist, is the man who wrote “The Verdict”, “The Untouchables”, “Glengarry Glen Ross”, “The Spanish Prisoner”, “The Edge”, “Wag the Dog,” and “Ronin”, among many others.

However, Mamet will have a small comeback soon. This past January, he revealed that he recently wrapped a film with Shia LaBeouf, an adaptation of his off-broadway play, “Henry Johnson”. It was barely made for a million dollars. A few months later, he also confirmed that he’s writing a script about Hunter Biden’s life for the “Sound of Freedom” producers.

Speaking to podcaster Andrew Klavan, Mamet had blasted the “brain-dead” Hollywood executives that he has met and noted that he does not work in the studio system anymore, “because, ‘A’ they don’t want me, and ‘B,’ I don’t want them.”