Tribune. On the day of the Revelation dinner, we learned that two godmothers (Virginie Despentes and Claire Denis) chosen by young actors to accompany them during this evening had been refused by the Académie des Césars in an arbitrary, even discriminatory, manner. The same evening, its president, Alain Terzian, sent a letter of apology but without answering the substance of the questions raised by this affair. Apologies but no explanations.
Today, it seems to us that the refusal of these godmothers is only one aspect of the more general dysfunctions of the Academy of the Caesars and the 1901 association (the CPA) which governs it. Alain Terzian recently made announcements regarding the parity of voters and members of the association. We welcome these upcoming changes, but they do not appear to be sufficient.
The Academy of Caesars is made up of 4,700 members, highly selected, who each pay an annual subscription and can vote to elect the nominees and the winners of each category. The signatories of this text are all part of it. However, although members, we have no voice in the chapter neither in the functioning of the academy and association, nor in the course of the ceremony.
Until a few years ago, the association’s annual accounts and statutes appeared on the Césars website (in the members only area), but this is no longer the case today. This clouding of accounts is damaging and part of a potentially fantastical view of how money is spent. It is all the more difficult to admit that the amount of the contributions is important and that it is all the more the price to be paid to the academy so that our films are part of the DVDs sent to each member in the famous “Caesar box”.
On the side of the statutes of the association, the situation is hardly more enviable, these not having evolved for a very long time. Among the 47 members of the association, the personalities come from two horizons: on the one hand, those who have been coopted for life at different periods in the history of the academy, and whose last cooptations date back more than twenty years. On the other, “de jure” members who join the association as soon as they are French and have obtained an Oscar in the United States. But the statutes do not allow a new member of the association to be elected by all of the 4,700 members of the academy.
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