No conservative could honestly have expected the 2024 biopic “Reagan” to be a viable contender for Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. Ultraliberal Hollywood could never honor a film that dares to depict our 40th president as a hero.

But the fact that it’s officially ineligible for nomination because it doesn’t meet new diversity requirements? What an indictment of the industry that, ironically, catapulted Reagan onto the public stage years before he ran for office. This is political correctness on steroids.

To be eligible now for a Best Picture nomination, a film must meet at least two of four “inclusion standards.”

One ensures that “at least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors … is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.” The list ranges from “African American” and “Hispanic or Latina/e/o/x” to “Pacific Islander” and “Southeast Asian.”

Race isn’t the only accepted category. You can also appease the Academy by ensuring that your cast, crew, or those who distribute or market the film are women, LGBTQ, or “people with cognitive or physical disabilities.”

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The list goes on, but the intent is obvious: to check every box possible on the far-left’s approved checklist.

Imagine the chilling effect this will have on Hollywood. Some fine films will surely be rejected in the proposal phase because they won’t easily conform to these “standards.”

Consider some past Best Picture winners that would be disqualified today. 1970’s “Patton,” for one. Sure, it would be historically inaccurate to make the players in this World War II film a multigender, rainbow-colored group, but good luck capturing the top prize at the Oscars otherwise.

Or how about 1972’s “The Godfather”? Just look at the cast. So male, so White, so straight. Mind you, that’s the logical way to go if you’re making a film about the Italian mafia in the middle of the 20th century, but it also means your chances for a Best Picture statuette will be sleeping with the fishes.

Or take 1984’s “Amadeus.” It took some great writing, acting and directing to mount this dramatic tale of the rivalry between Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri. It also took a very homogeneous cast for a story set in 18th-century Europe. But that alone would eliminate it as a possible Best Picture today.

Other past winners in this category: “Annie Hall.” “Rocky.” “Kramer vs. Kramer.” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The list, like the Oscar broadcast itself, goes on and on.

It’s true that “Reagan” isn’t alone in being excluded this year. The “standards” knocked more than 100 films out of contention.

But no one expected “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Madame Web” and “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” to snag a Best Picture nod. “Reagan,” however unpopular it may be politically, at least deserved to be nominated. The fact that Hollywood is excluding from Best Picture films that don’t genuflect at the altar of diversity is a sad commentary.

“There’s a loss of freedom of expression,” Dennis Quaid, the actor who portrays Reagan, said of the new rules. “Back in the ’70s, [Hollywood] may have been skewed to the left, but everybody was trying to be politically incorrect back then. It was an exciting time. We had a real dialogue with people instead of trying to fit into a mold.”

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Making a high-quality film isn’t the primary goal anymore. Feeling good about it is. You may lose money hand over fist at the box office, but at least you can hold your head high at the fashionable parties and assure your snobby friends that you employed the right number of people from all the approved categories.

There’s nothing wrong with having a diverse cast or crew. Film producers should be free to hire the most qualified person for each role or job. Nothing could be more American than following a merit-based system that doesn’t exclude anyone with the proper qualifications from consideration.

But those qualifications should be confined to one’s talent or ability to do a particular job—not membership in a special protected class. To mandate otherwise means instituting a decidedly un-American practice: quotas. Yet it’s just as wrong to include people based on their gender, race or other factors as it is to exclude them.

In 1983, President Reagan signed the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. into law. In 2025, Hollywood is discriminating against a Reagan biopic because it is insufficiently diverse.

It’s the kind of farce that would make a good movie. Too bad it couldn’t win Best Picture.