The Oscars now require movies to check racial and gender boxes just to compete for Best Picture.
Now two of Hollywood's most beloved comedians are finally saying what every normal American was already thinking.
David Spade just used one word to explain what Hollywood's race and gender obsession is doing to the people it claims to help.
SNL Veterans Spade and Carvey Call Out Hollywood DEI Race Announcements as Diminishing
Comedian David Spade has spent nearly four decades in Hollywood.
At Just Shoot Me, producers made a regular practice of informing the cast whenever a female director came on for the week.
Every time, Spade's reaction was the same.
"That's fine. Just is it a director? Yeah. Okay, we got it. Like you don't even have to say that," Spade recalled on the podcast.
Announcing someone's gender or race before their credentials isn't celebration, it's a qualifier.
"It feels like a little, not condescending, but a little diminishing," Spade added.
That word – diminishing – is the one Hollywood's diversity machine has spent a decade desperately trying to avoid.
Dana Carvey piled on with a joke that landed harder than most pundits ever will.
He said Emmy presenters should just announce him as the "198th straight white male that has won this award" – flipping Hollywood's identity-obsessed formula directly back at the institution that created it.
Spade and Carvey have spent years interviewing every major name from the Saturday Night Live universe on their podcast without either man turning it into a culture war battleground.
This was different – two veterans who know exactly how Hollywood works, finally saying the thing Hollywood punishes people for saying.
These are also the same two men who blamed LA Mayor Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom by name in March, calling Hollywood's decline under their leadership "terrifying."
Now they've gone after the DEI apparatus driving the collapse.
The Oscars Built a DEI Quota System Into Best Picture Eligibility
While Spade watched the weekly diversity theater play out in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was building that theater into official policy.
Starting with the 2024 Oscars, every film competing for Best Picture had to meet two out of four DEI criteria – covering on-screen representation, crew demographics, industry apprenticeships, and the race and gender makeup of the marketing team – with filmmakers required to document the race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status of everyone involved.
Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.3 billion in 2024.
The Academy shut it out of Best Picture while nominating arthouse films that a fraction of moviegoers ever saw – not because those films were better, but because they checked the right boxes on a compliance form.
The studios eventually did the math.
Amazon, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery all quietly rolled back their DEI hiring commitments in 2025 – not out of principle, but because audiences stopped showing up.
Even Issa Rae – who built her entire brand on Hollywood diversity advocacy – admitted that DEI has "become a bad word" when pitching projects to studio executives.
The people who rode DEI into rooms they'd never previously entered can't even use the term anymore without watching the room go cold.
This isn't a movement in retreat – it's a machine that broke itself.
Hollywood built the DEI apparatus at the peak of the woke moment in 2020, when studios were tripping over each other to prove their commitment to racial quotas, and now they're quietly tearing it down because the box office math doesn't lie.
The entire system – the racial announcements, the compliance forms, the diversity checklists stitched into Oscar eligibility – was built on the premise that pointing out someone's race or gender before their work was honoring them.
Announcing someone as "the first black director to win" doesn't celebrate the achievement – it tells the audience the race came first and the work came second.
It tells the award winner they got there not just because they were brilliant, but because they were the right demographic at the right moment.
That's the condescension hiding inside the applause.
While Karen Bass let Los Angeles burn and studios fled to other states, Gavin Newsom was busy calling the collapse governance.
The Academy built a DEI compliance checklist into the most prestigious award in cinema and called it inclusion.
David Spade found a better word.
Diminishing.
Sources:
- Paul Bois, "Dana Carvey, David Spade Say Hollywood Should Quit Its Obsession with Race and Gender," Breitbart, October 29, 2026.
- "David Spade Says Hollywood Should Stop Focusing on Race and Gender," Washington Times, October 29, 2026.
- "David Spade Slams Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass Over 'Terrifying' Hollywood Downfall," Fox News, March 21, 2026.
- "Actress Says DEI Has Become a 'Bad Word' After Years of Hollywood Pushing Identity Politics," Western Journal, 2026.
- "Hollywood Is Walking Back Its DEI Commitments and Some Woke Employees Are Angry," Hot Air, March 5, 2025.