Hollywood legend Michael Caine has added to the Oscars ‘race controversy’ by saying black actors should be “patient” for Academy Award nominations.

He also said he wouldn’t vote for a black actor solely based on their race.

Speaking to the BBC, Caine said: “There are loads of black actors; I think in the end you can’t vote for an actor (just) because he’s black. You can’t say: I’m going to vote for him, he’s not very good but he’s black, (so) I’ll vote for him. You’ve got to give a good performance.”

Caine added that Idris Elba, who wasn’t nominated for this year’s Academy Awards,  was “wonderful” in “Beasts of No Nation.”

His message to black actors was “be patient.” “Of course it will come. It took me years to get an Oscar,” he added.

Caine, who recently appeared in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, has nabbed six Oscar nomination, and won twice.

He said not going to the Oscar ceremony may be a blessing in disguise.

“The great thing about it is you don’t have to go,” he said. “Especially the Oscars. Twenty-four hours on an airplane and I’m going to sit there clapping Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I love Leonardo, he played my son in a movie, but I’m too old to travel that far to sit in an audience and clap someone else.”

Sweeping reforms designed to help diversify the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have been announced, in the face of a swirling controversy over the all-white list of actors nominated for this year’s awards.
The Academy’s board is seeking to double the number of female members by 2020 and plans to launch a global effort to “recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity”, it said.

“These new measures regarding governance and voting will have an immediate impact and begin the process of significantly changing our membership composition,” Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs said.

The changes were approved in a unanimous vote by the Academy’s board of governors on Thursday night (local time).

To increase diversity immediately, the Academy said it would establish three new governor seats that will be nominated by the president for three-year terms and confirmed by the board.

For a second year in a row, Academy members nominated only white actors for the 20 slots for Oscars, causing an outcry.

Acclaimed director Spike Lee, actor Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith all announced they would stay away from this year’s ceremony on February 28.

The Academy has some 6,000 members, all of whom work in the film industry and are elected by their peers for life.

According to a 2012 study by the Los Angeles Times, nearly 94 per cent of the Academy voters are white and most of them are male.