“I was not educated enough.” Frances McDormand Regrets “Inclusion Rider” Oscar Speech
“I was not educated enough.” Frances McDormand Regrets “Inclusion Rider” Oscar Speech
Groupthink hinders progress
Imagine one day you hear about an idea for the very first time. Then the next day you face an audience of millions. Would you call on your audience to embrace that new idea?
In 2018, Frances McDormand did just that.
After winning the Academy Award for best actress for her role in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” McDormand took to the stage and urged Hollywood to embrace a relatively unknown idea—inclusion riders—as a way to boost diversity. Two years later, she admitted she’d made a mistake.
“I wish I’d never fucking said it now,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was not educated enough, I didn’t have enough information about it.”
What’s an inclusion rider? It’s a stipulation that actors and actresses can demand to have included in their contracts that requires a certain level of diversity among a production’s cast and crew.
Inclusion riders are controversial, but let’s set aside their pros and cons and focus on the environment that generated the anecdote. McDormand isn't some naive rookie who found herself in the limelight for the first time. She’s one of Hollywood’s most accomplished veterans.
That night in 2018 she was taking home her second Best Actress Oscar. She won her third in 2021 for her performance in “Nomadland,” and we might see her on stage again on Sunday. In addition to acting in it, McDormand is a producer on the Best Picture nominee “Women Talking.”
What does it say about the incentives at play in her environment that someone with such gravitas would feel so comfortable delivering such a half-cocked message about a complex topic?
The Hollywood Reporter called McDormand’s acceptance speech “industry shaping,” noting that, “Within days, studios and agents were fielding new questions about how to draft and implement inclusion riders.”
McDormand probably played a role in the Grammys’ decision to become the first awards show to adopt an inclusion rider. Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, announced, “I am proud that the Academy is leading the charge in releasing an inclusion rider for the music community that counters systematic bias.”
Mason’s 2021 announcement came a year after McDormand opened up to The Hollywood Reporter. Press coverage of his decision lauds the actress for “prompting a reckoning on representation on and behind the camera,” while staying mum on her regrets.
What was the genesis of the industry-shaping acceptance speech?
McDormand explains:
I had met someone at a dinner party the night before, an agent at UTA, and she had told me, ‘Did you know about this?’ We had a long conversation about it, and I found it really fascinating. ‘Inclusion rider’ was something that was like, ‘Maybe we should discuss this.’
One conversation with one agent the night before the Oscars—that was all McDormand needed to endorse inclusion riders in front of an audience of 27 million viewers.
Consider her most memorable line: “I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider!”
Imagine that that night before the Oscars in 2018 McDormand had a chance encounter with a different dinner party guest. Imagine that the guest shared her passion for minority advancement, but had grown convinced that some popular strategies were actually hurting minorities. Imagine that the guest told her about an idea—a heterodox idea—that could help fix the problem.
What are the chances McDormand would have marched up to the Oscar podium with a different message? Maybe something like, “I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: mismatch theory!”
It’s important to give McDormand credit for admitting her mistake. We’re all wrong about something, probably many things. And admitting when we’re wrong gets us a little closer to being right.
And it’s not clear that McDormand is necessarily against inclusion riders, but she does call the issue of inclusion “very important” and “complicated.” And that’s the key. We should always resist groupthink, but especially when it comes to issues that are very important and complicated.
Watch McDormand (above) during the post-Oscars press conference. She clearly enjoys the positive reinforcement she receives, and we’re all like that.
We want our tribe to affirm us. But the more we focus on tribal affirmation, the more credulous we become toward tribe-approved beliefs. That’s how dogma gets made.
If we assume our tribe enjoys a monopoly on truth, we become susceptible to blind spots. And the best solution to an important problem might be hiding behind a blind spot.
So for those who care about actually fixing our biggest problems, I have two words to leave you with, ladies and gentlemen: viewpoint diversity.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn,” “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.