Roseanne Barr for President; Motion Picture Academy board member election

The doc division is great because I think we're way ahead of the other branches of the Academy and we do have a diverse membership. But, you know, it's not enough. I think that the Academy does great work in education and we need to really push diversity by encouraging people from underserved communities to really want to become documentary filmmakers.

Exactly. We can't wait for Hollywood to open doors for us. We have to open doors for ourselves.

Absolutely, absolutely. We in the documentary branch just invited our first African American women to join the branch. Dawn Porter, Shola Lynch and Laurens Grant. Can you imagine that we just assumed there were African American women in the branch but there were not? This says a lot about where the Academy is, but also a lot about where we're going to go. This is, like I said, the beginning.

Well, they don't have to leave the Academy. They're losing their voting rights. I think if you're not an active part of the community, if you're not working in the industry, then you shouldn't vote. It's that simple. They can be in the Academy and can enjoy the benefits of being an Academy member, but I think the voters need to be people who are active in the community because this is about your peers. This is about peers voting for the people in your branch and I think that's important.

When you sit down and look at the two hundred something films that were shot in a year and, as a costume designer, you have to pick five, I get overwhelmed. All my thoughts of color go out the window because I got into creative mode. We have our years and we don't have our years. We've had some good years where there have been a lot of people of color nominated.

I'm running for governor because I feel I can be a positive advocate and ambassador in representing the Academy's recent step toward further inclusivity and helping people who don't know that they can actually do this position or think it's above them.

I really think that the Academy should take necessary steps in recognizing talent and diversity. And it's not just African Americans but all people of color.

I really responded to the Academy's call for diversity. It's kind of a word I hate, but I understand the intention behind it. I fundamentally feel that the Academy is in a fantastic leadership role. It doesn't have to follow the trends in Hollywood, it can lead the trends in Hollywood. I wanted to be a part of that. So I'm running and hopefully will be able to affect some of those changes that well all know we need in this town.

(Laughs) Well, I've gotten fired from jobs because my music is not masculine enough. Things like that. Little comments. The little things that you hear every day that you brush over in an early career but then as you get older and you've heard them five million times you say, Okay, maybe we need to change. But I think more than that I see that there's a real inequity in the way that people of color and women advance. There seems to be less facility in that and I think that's something we need to look at. The other thing we talk about a lot that strikes me as so strange is there's an invisibility of a community that already exists. Our alliance — we have over 125 members and that's just a fraction of the women composers who exist and are working. I don't know why it is that people are constantly saying there aren't any women composers because there are. Having said that, I'm not naive. I know that women compose 2% of the top 250 box office films. As soon as we become more visible, it's my belief that we can start doing those bigger projects, which we're not doing right now.

Look, we have a big ugly problem but I think we're starting to fix it. I gotta tell you, if you asked me that three years ago, I would have rolled my eyes, shrugged my shoulders and I would have shrunk into my chair in depression and said, this is what it is. But, I do think there's a movement. Now, whether that movement starts to reflect more work in the top class of Hollywood projects, I don't know that. I can't predict that. But what I can tell you is this year, we're going to have a really diverse class in the music branch. I can tell you, as long as I am there and as long as anybody will listen to me, either as a governor or just a member, any way that we are going to continue to push for these things. That excites me. I think there's hope.

There's another kind of comedy. There's the kind that speaks truth to power and not to pacify the victims of power. That is the difference between a serious comedian and a clown.

That's exactly what happened, but if they had any brains, which they don't, they would have seen that I could be very useful to a third party and I think I have been. This year is the first year in American election history that almost 16 percent of the public is going to vote for a third party. I think I was ahead of a trend.

Yeah, I think he stole my s***, but I offered it freely and I hoped somebody would for God's sake and I'm very honored that he did and sometimes word for word. And I also think that Trump stole a lot of my s***, too, because I also considered this government a failed senate and they are not representing the people who put them there. 

Like I said in the debates, I and I alone convinced a gaggle of very conservative television executives that having gay people on in the family hour was indeed a good idea. And I felt that because I did that, I could run for president and not only run for president, but be president and make America great again, along with the rest of the damn world with it. 

Once, I think it was a New York Times reporter that asked me, "Do you think there would be a Hillary Clinton without a Roseanne Conner? and I said, "No. I don't."  The writers on the show and I made it palatable to middle class America, to working class America, and even to the halls of those people in power, that women were smart and they were very shocked to hear that.  

Just bottom-line, common-sense talking about demographics, which is something that I used to study a lot, so I approached them on that. It was a very professional, uptown, Harvard-ish way of talking. And I do wanna say for the gay thing, I do have a gay brother and sister, so that was something that I knew was very important at that time. 

Yeah, cause I always thought that my whole life as a little girl watching television and going, "Why is it only 'Father Knows Best' and all the women have pretty dresses and pearls on? None of the women in my family looked like that. They all weighed 300 pounds and worked harder than men physically, so why isn't that ever on there because everyone that I see and grew up with that was the reality." It's just class bulls*** and I wanted to kick that in and I did.

There's a lot of great stuff to watch on television and Netflix and a lot of great content out there and I'll tell you one thing: There's nothing about class in America. I think that is such an uncomfortable conversation in our country right now and we probably won't see it because it's just too real. And if I did come back that's all I would talk about and I would be nude.

I don't know. I mean I'm tired. I could never work that hard again. I'm sixty-four now. I got six grandkids. I like teaching them to swear and stuff more than anything else.