LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Following an outcry over the all-white roster of actors nominated for this year‘s Oscars, the president of the film academy said Monday she was heartbroken by the lack of diversity and working to implement change.

“This is a difficult but important conversation, and it’s time for big changes,” Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said in a statement.

Isaacs said that while it was important to acknowledge the work of the actors nominated for the awards being given out on February 28, she was “both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion.”

Earlier Monday, filmmaker Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith said they would boycott the Oscars ceremony because of the all-white slate of actors. Their nomination last week set social media abuzz with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite.

Isaacs, who is black, has pushed for more diversity in the Academy‘s ranks since her election in 2013.

But she acknowledged in her statement that “change is not coming as fast as we would like.”

“We need to do more, and better and more quickly,” she said.

“In the ’60s and ‘70s it was about recruiting younger members to stay vital and relevant. In 2016, the mandate is inclusion in all of its facets: gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.”

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 percent of the Academy voters are white and mostly male. The Times found that blacks account for two percent of the Academy and Latinos are less than two percent.

Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the Times study showed, and people younger than 50 constitute 14 percent of the membership.