On Oscar night, in the first moments after the biggest screwup in Academy Awards history, the two women who run the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rose from their seats in the Dolby Theater and headed in opposite directions. Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the elected president and public face of the Academy, made her way down the aisle to the red-carpeted theater lobby and the Governors Ball, where stunned stars, filmmakers, and executives asked a question she could not yet answer: how on earth had Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong best-picture winner? Dawn Hudson, the C.E.O. who runs the Academy day-to-day, charged up the steps to the fluorescent-lit backstage area to interrogate the telecast's producers, accountants, and stage crew about this gargantuan mistake, which took an agonizing two and a half minutes to address on live television.
For the last four years, these two women have been uneasy partners in steering the Academy through one of the most contentious, revolutionary eras in its history. Now the industry group is at a crossroads, poised to choose new leadership for an uncertain future.
Hudson, who assumed the paid C.E.O. position in 2011, comes up for contract renewal next month. Boone Isaacs, who in 2013 became the Academy’s first African-American president and only its third woman, ends her final year in the unpaid and increasingly demanding gig in July. One rumor raised by multiple Academy members is that Boone Isaacs could some day be a candidate for Hudson’s job, but so far she has stayed mum about her post-presidential plans.
On Tuesday night, Hudson, Boone Isaacs, and the board of governors convened in a glass-walled boardroom at the Academy's Wilshire Boulevard headquarters for their annual Oscar night post-mortem. After several hours of discussion, the group decided not to fire PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm that has handled Oscar balloting for 83 years and manages the Academy's taxes and other financial documents. “We’ve been unsparing in our assessment that the mistake made by representatives of the firm was unacceptable,” Boone Isaacs said in an e-mail sent to Academy members on Wednesday. She then listed new protocols designed to prevent another such mistake, including adding a third accountant in the telecast's control room and banning electronic devices backstage.
The meeting closed one chapter—the organization’s Envelopegate response—but opened another as the board began to prepare for spring elections. For decades a sleepy enterprise, Academy elections have recently become a higher-wattage event. Last year 66 candidates competed for the 17 open seats, with newcomers like Steven Spielberg and Laura Dern joining the group that already included Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Michael Mann, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, new Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos, and Fox Searchlight president Nancy Utley.
Boone Isaacs’s successor will come from the new board, and right now nearly everyone who has ever parked in the Academy’s underground garage is considered a contender, including former Academy president Sid Ganis, onetime Lionsgate co-chair Rob Friedman, Kennedy, Utley, and casting director David Rubin.
Whoever gets the job will inherit more daunting responsibilities than the ones faced by previous Academy presidents like Gregory Peck, Bette Davis, and even Ganis, who served from 2005 to 2009. The group’s new leader will have to execute the ambitious and sometimes polarizing diversity goals the board set in 2016, which means inviting bigger and more inclusive classes of new members for years to come, and stripping voting rights from some members who are no longer active in the industry. And he or she will have to push the delayed, more than $400 million Academy Museum through to completion, now set for 2019.
In pressing those two giant projects forward, Boone Isaacs and Hudson have accomplished things that stymied generations of Academy leaders before them. Along the way, they have also ticked off a lot of people. Many Academy members, including Spielberg, have said they did not like the hasty manner in which the diversity initiative was rolled out. Others wonder, with so much money going toward the Academy Museum, what’s happening to the group’s budgets, and its other, less glossy educational projects.
As they’ve presided over an era of historic change, Boone Isaacs and Hudson have also drawn a lot of attention for their professional dynamic. As covered by the Hollywood trades, theirs is a feud in the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford tradition—a garish illustration in Variety in March depicted Boone Isaacs and Hudson staring each other down, arms crossed, as a lightning bolt struck a swirling Oscar behind them. I often wonder if there had been two men in their roles, would their disagreements over the last four years be depicted with such finger-licking glee.
But the reality of their dynamic is somewhat less juicy, as far as I can tell from multiple meetings with both women. Boone Isaacs’s New England reserve and Steady Eddie sense of Academy tradition sometimes butts against Hudson’s southern agreeability and indie film world tempo. Their relationship started off on the wrong foot when Hudson backed Rob Friedman, not Boone Isaacs, in the Academy presidential election in 2013. While Boone Isaacs is seen as an advocate for the below-the-line artisans who make up much of the Academy, Hudson, who has museum fund-raising as a key component of her job, often seems closer to deep-pocketed actors and executives.
Some have criticized how long it took the Academy to release a statement after the Envelopegate fiasco—a full 24 hours, perhaps reasonable in the slower-paced, more deliberative Hollywood of the past but not in an era when backstage photos of a tweeting PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant are picked apart like the Zapruder film. Their dueling responses on Oscar night seem to crystallize the differences between the two women: Boone Isaacs followed the original plan and headed into the crowd to face the music. Hudson pivoted toward the stage to manage the crisis.
The next big Oscar night catastrophe will be another Academy president's problem. Boone Isaacs closed her e-mail to members by asking them to run for office. “Please think about seizing this opportunity to write the Academy’s next great chapter,” she wrote. “Membership has its privileges, but it also has its responsibilities. We need you.”
