There can be no more turning to the local authority if things go wrong: academies are autonomous, and that means that if you're a governor, the buck stops with you.
Also, even for people who understood that the Oscars were a reflection rather than the source of what is wrong, the academy was the perfect target of opportunity, the soft underbelly of the movie business.
The decision to stop pupils in the wrong clothes attending Hanson academy, which serves a deprived part of Bradford, was made after staff became increasingly frustrated at the amount of time spent enforcing uniform expectations.
I'd be a hypocrite to say I think becoming an academy is the wrong choice, because for our school it hasn't been.
At the same time, Mr. Zadan and Mr. Meron raised eyebrows with an extended tribute to one of their own movies, "Chicago," and rubbed academy members the wrong way when they used the orchestra to drum some winners off the stage.
If, as he argues in another piece, most historical movies get it wrong, "the academy must take at least some of the blame, for having largely abandoned, until recently, the importance of storytelling as the elementary condition of historical explanation".
"I'm concerned that people are thinking about this in terms of 'either or,' and that's the wrong approach," said Dr. Lori J. Heim, the academy's president.
"They're all top-level athletes and often they come out of academies regretting some of the wrong turns they took," he said.
"Whether academies are good or not is the wrong debate.
As often as it got the right person in the right film, the academy conferred honor on the right person in the wrong film the wrong person in the right film, or the wrong person in the wrong film.
