New York, New York - Veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss let rip at the new diversity rules put in place for next year's Academy Awards, saying they make him "vomit" and demanding the right "to play a Black man."

The Jaws star was speaking to Firing Line host Margaret Hoover, who asked for his thoughts on the new diversity standards for Best Picture eligibility at the Oscars.

Starting 2024, nominees will have to fulfill at least two out of four criteria, which include having at least one lead character and a minimum of 30% of the cast from an underrepresented group.

Dreyfuss immediately responded: "They make me vomit."

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He went on to complain about being made to "give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is," reducing equal representation and the push for more diversity to nothing more than an effort to avoid "hurting people's feelings."

"You have to let life be life," the 75-year-old insisted, "and I'm sorry, I don't think there's a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that."

Dreyfuss wasn't done there. Claiming that the legendary Laurence Olivier was the last white man to play William Shakespeare's Othello – a character of African descent – he pointed out that the English actor used blackface in his performance.

"Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a Black man? Is someone else being told that if they're not Jewish, they shouldn't play [Shakespeare's] Merchant of Venice?" an outraged Dreyfuss asked. "Are we crazy?!"

When Hoover suggested that there might be a difference between the two examples, given the history and present of anti-Black racism in the US, she got a simple reply: "There shouldn't be."

The Academy Awards' well-documented diversity problem has come under more and more scrutiny over the past years, even getting its own social media hashtag: #OscarsSoWhite.