by Katie Rodriguez
The 82nd annual Academy Awards were a couple of weeks ago. The biggest awards of the night went to Sandra Bullock for Actress in a Leading Role, Jeff Bridges for Actor in a Leading Role, The Hurt Locker for Best Picture, and Kathyrn Bigelow for Directing. Bigelow was the first female director to win the award in the 82 years of the Academy Awards. In a NYT op-ed published before the awards were announced, Kim Elsesser suggested that the Academy start desegregating its nominations based on gender. She argues that doing so is only fair- that there are desegregated competitions (like American Idol) and professions (airline flight attendants) that as such have proven to be beneficial to women. Why then can we not extend this gender neutrality to an arena in which men and women should ideally be able to compete as equals? Because although men and women may have equal acting abilities, they do not have equal acting roles.
In a recent EW post, Nick Cox suggests that making the Academy Awards gender neutral would be, in effect, useless because there are always going to be biological differences between men and women and both sexes will always be needed to reproduce. The gender binary that we would be trying to erase by having gender neutral awards, he says, doesn’t need to be erased. Rather, it needs to be reconceptualized.
I agree that we need to reconceptualize gender and how we discuss it, which is why when there is the option of combining or reconceptualizing simple parts of popular culture, we should. This isn’t to say that the 82nd Academy Awards should have been gender neutral, but I do think we should work towards that goal. Before we can, though, we need to start reconceptualizing what acting and women’s roles in acting entails.
Let’s consider how many movies even have women in the leading roles. When you quickly run out of those, consider how many movies even feature to some degree a woman. Many times, when a woman is a in a somewhat leading or featured role, she’s romantically attached to the leading man. When women have ‘strong roles,’ they’re marketed as such. For instance, in Angelina Jolie’s upcoming movie, Salt, her role as a spy is atypical. Her being a female spy is unusual, though how many spy movies (and series) feature men? James Bond, Mission Impossible, The Bourne Identity and many others versus…Charlie’s Angels, a hypersexualized female spy series? We cannot even take seriously sometimes the ‘strong roles’ that are given to women, instead seeing them as opportunities to sexualize those woman and their roles.
Elesser’s suggestion that we move into gender neutral acting awards would, at this point, be detrimental to female actors. Female actors are not given equal roles to men and aren’t even always marketed as actors, they’re marketed as females, as sex symbols. While it would be ideal to think that if the awards were gender neutral, better roles for women would appear, it doesn’t seem very likely just yet. The more likely result would be an overwhelming amount of men winning Oscars while women would be happy to even be nominated. Changing the structure of the awards is useless if the structure of the industry remains the same. I’d like women to have an equal chance of winning these awards, just as I’d like them to have an equal chance of earning good roles in films. But at this point with gender segregated awards, they only have an equal chance of winning.
Elsesser also posits in her op-ed piece the drama and outrage that would be caused by awards segregated on the basis of race.
Racial minorities do not have nearly the representation in Hollywood that white actors (using it as gender neutral term) have. They are in considerably fewer leading roles. What roles they do land conform to many of the same disadvantages that modern womens role’s have and they are as a result nominated less than thier white peers.
Leaving aside the racially charged undertones of many of the movies considered “great” this year (Precious, The Blind Side) minority actors simply do not have the same acting opportunities as white actors. Yet it is unacceptable in modern society to “protect” those minorities by giving them a separate category in which to be nominated, that ASSUMES the minority couldn’t win in a racial/ethnically neutral category.
My question is why women don’t get offended the same way racial minorities are assumed would be.
By definition racial minorities are…minorities…so it would be strange if a…majority…of leading roles were played by racial…minorities. Or do you mean that given the base rate of minorities as actors, a comparatively lower percentage of them are in leading roles? because I seriously doubt that’s true. Or do you mean that the proportion of racial minorities in this country that are actors is smaller than the corresponding proportion for whites? because whether or not that’s true, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant.
To proceed, how many of Denzel or Will Smith’s roles could not have been done by a white man? There was no need for the lead character in “Book of Eli” for example to be white or black or anything else. (The fact that these underdetermined roles are often played by blacks would seem to contradict your claim that minorities suffer many of the “disadvantages” women supposedly do.) But it was necessary that he be male. So I think the difference is that many more roles are closed off by sex than are closed off by race.
The question this should raise for you is why women would be especially discriminated against as compared to, e.g., blacks. When you find that there is no reason, perhaps you will consider the possibility that there is something other than discrimination at work here.
What the hell does biological differences have to do with acting ability?
No matter how great of an actor someone is, as an adult they will have difficulty convincingly playing the role of a child. Thus, their acting ability has little capability of overcoming the biological differences they have with the character they are trying to play.
The same applies to gender in many cases–albeit far less universally. Simply some roles are for women, some are for men. Perhaps those that could be played either as man or woman should be more equitably divvied out, but the fact remains that men and women are different in more than merely superficial ways.
I’m all for drag when appropriate, but I neither want to watch movies that are consistently full of drag as such nor movies that are full of actors playing across sex unconvincingly.
Also, eliminating gender based acting awards would mean less awards were handed out. Who wants that? I would guess most actors/actresses wouldn’t and I would also presume fans would be less than pleased.