In the midst of the controversy, the Academy's president Cheryl Boone Isaacs made a statement on the organization's twitter account.

Two of the more significant changes: stripping the voting status of new members that have not been active in the last 10 years and actively seeking those who come from traditionally underrepresented groups, rather than relying on the academy's longstanding method of acquiring new members by having two existing members sponsor them. Members will also receive lifetime voting rights after serving three consecutive terms; or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award.

Those members losing voting rights would be moved from active to "emeritus" status.

As part of the new push to expand gender and racial diversity, the academy said it will add three new seats to its 51-member governing board reserved for women and minorities. In order to maintain an active voting body, the Academy is mandating "activ[ity] in motion pictures" over the course of an initial decade-long membership. They would be absolved of paying dues and, except for voting, their academy privileges will remain the same.

Now - perhaps pushed to action by several celebrities' plans to boycott this year's Oscars - the Academy is actually doing something about it.

An Oscar statue is seen during the nominations announcements for the 88th Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, California on January 14, 2016.

"It pledged to not only recruit but double the number of women and people of color in membership over the next four years and to make changes in its current membership" to promote diversity.

Ali Jaafar, film journalist and former Variety International editor, said that while he welcomed the changes in the Academy's membership selection process, the issue of diversity goes beyond awards ceremonies.

The Academy consideration to revise the rules concerning diversity is nothing more than a "false flag" issue, and as such has set in motion an angry conversation, without intellectual sense, professional conviction, or simple humility.It does not even begin to address the issue of diversity.

"It's unprecedented for the academy to make this kind of drastic overhaul", said Tom O'Neil, editor of the awards-tracking website Gold Derby.

There is a remarked absence of filmmakers or actors of color in this year's Oscars nominations. Actors receiving enough first-place votes - more than the threshold number arrived at by taking the total number of ballots received per category and dividing it by six (the number of possible nominees plus one) - become nominees. "Everyone needs to be skewered from this, from the people that are complaining to the people who aren't saying anything to the people that are saying there's no problem, to the people that are saying it's all problems", he said.

Once a member, an actor votes for Oscar nominations online or, if requested, by paper ballot.

"I find it fantastic that we're an industry that in the 1930s, most of our leads were women".