The Oscars are just white enough for Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director responded to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy spreading through Hollywood after the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences failed to nominate any actors of color in the major acting categories.
TMZ asked the 85-year-old about the Oscars' lack of diversity on Friday while he was leaving a restaurant.
"I don't know anything about it," Eastwood said. His willful ignorance didn't end there. "All I know is there's thousands of people in the Academy, and the majority of them haven't won Oscars. A lot of people are crying, I guess."
Eastwood, who's won four Academy Awards, joins an array of other white actors speaking out in opposition to the #OscarsSoWhite movement.
Actress Charlotte Rampling called the backlash "racist to white people" in an interview with The Guardian. When asked about the exclusion of actors of color from the nominee pool, the Oscar nominee said, "One can never really know, but perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list."
The 69-year-old British actress walked back the comments after receiving hours of backlash.
"I regret that my comments could have been misinterpreted. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world every performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration," Rampling said in a statement to CBS News.
Similarly, actress and writer Julie Delpy said there's "nothing worse than being a woman in this [acting] business."
"Two years ago, I said something about the Academy being very white male, which is the reality, and I was slashed to pieces by the media," she told TheWrap at the Sundance Film Festival. "It's funny — women can't talk. I sometimes wish I were African American because people don't bash them afterward."
Even British actor Michael Caine got in the convo. Caine, who's won an Oscar, told BBC Radio 4, "There's loads of black actors. In the end you can't vote for an actor because he's black," he said. "You can't say, 'I'm going to vote for him, he's not very good, but he's black, I'll vote for him."
Amid a growing chorus of high-powered names upset with the lack of diversity, the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences instituted new rules that pose term limits on those with voting privileges. However, Caine and Eastwood won’t be penalized by the new rules since they’ve both won Oscars.
