Well, I don't know if I agree, but it's a thought

[trinityvixen]

The Academy Awards = Sexist!

It is an interesting question. Does gender-segregating an award automatically create a separate-and-therefore-inequal metric? On the one hand, we don't segregae major awards that recognize talent, as the woman in the video says. On the other, we do segregate awards for achievements of physical natures--men and women's sports, for example. Acting is in the unfortunate category where we sort of demand both. I'm not saying you must be an athlete to win one (Jack Nicholson certainly isn't), only that your body is honed to best express your craft as much as your mind is. Your mind ennervates your body to bring about the performance you wish. If I had to compare it to a sport to defend the sex-segregation of awards, I'd say acting is closest to rhythm gymnastics or ice dancing.

But acting isn't ice dancing. The nuances of physical difference of typical muscle mass hardly play into determining who is the better actor. Yes, you use your body to act, but your body's set of dangly bits hardly has an impact on how well you use it to emote and carry across a scene. In this case, the body is a tool, not a temple. Or perhaps it is an instrument, and while you get lovely sounds out of different instruments and it's hard to pick a favorite, you can certainly choose the best from among them based on how well they're played. A Stradivarius played poorly is nothing to a master on a cheap trombone, is my thinking here.

Do I want them to give out only just the one award for Best Actor? Honestly? No, I don't. In the video I linked to, the woman mentions the paltry showing of women among Nobel laureates. I fully expect, with the current climate in Hollywood, that the singular Best Actor award would go to a man every year until I am eighty. They might have the token female award, but that would be it. Because there is a serious crisis over roles for women in film, has been for nearly thirty years, with no immediate end in sight. I like her phrasing it as the "hookers, victims and doormats" problem because it is. Helen Mirren's win for The Queen was one of few roles to break that stereotype of late, but she is friggin' Helen Mirren, and I'm sure if she stooped to playing a hooker, we'd all be looking for horses two, three, and four of the obviously imminent apocalypse.

Does maintaining the segregation of awards mask this dearth of meaty roles for women in film? Possibly, but I think the change will not come by reforming top-down. It has to come from the bottom up. Better scripts, to start. Promoting films with female leads who aren't Angelina Jolie would be a big change. I'm such a pessimist, however, because Hollywood is a fantasy factory. The dominant fantasies of our day continue to demand women be skinny, busty, beautiful and everything else is secondary. Literally, even though they might be fabulous in a role and have serious skill, the first thing mentioned is their looks (Remember the fuss about Charlize Theron uglying it up for Monster? I'm sure many people couldn't tell you anything about A Mighty Heart other than Angelina Jolie had frizzier hair than she normally does.) All that has to change before the Oscars will have a chance to reflect upon the great performances of the year and then give out awards proportionate to populations of people.

For now, I'll take my token "papered-over" awards for women. If they can use it, as they do, every year, to complain about how there were so few to nominate, even, maybe some day the complaint will resonate down to the ground floor from whence change must come. Maybe.

Comments

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, I am so sick of feminism sucking all the everything out of everything.* Women play different roles than men do, and as a woman and a sometimes-actress, I DO NOT WANT (insert lolcat here) my performances to be judged against men. I think it's harder to compare performances, because the kinds of roles are different, and men and women have different acting strengths.


(NB: written while exhausted, but no, I don't actually think every woman has a responsibility to wave the feminist banner, and I don't. I'm not looking for debate on the topic.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you commented to give an actress' perspective. It's something I lack, and it is different. It would be nice to hear if women who compete for this sort of award would feel they'd be better served by competing with men. I'd wager your attitude would be the prevailing one--why compete with men if it's apples and oranges?

Beyond that, I'd say that the comparisons of acting talent in particular roles is already complicated enough. There's already a lack of a reliable standard, and more than one award has gone to someone for the lesser of two great roles because they were "owed" something (Russell Crowe winning for Gladiator the best acting award he deserved for The Insider). More than a few performances have gone unawarded despite their strength because of the films they were in (I maintain that Johnny Depp was robbed for his performance in The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl because JESUS. I hadn't seen anyone so immersed and subtle and yet completely over-the-top in a role in FOREVER).

With putting men and women in one category to vye for the award, you'd also have a thicker padding of people trying for awards they didn't merit. I mean like the phenomena of having the only actress in a movie be nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar instead of a Best Lead one. They changed the fucking category's NAME to make this okay (it used to be Best Supporting, now it's Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role--so, therefore, anyone you can argue didn't have enough time in/impact on the story would be "in a supporting role" so I guess Anthony Hopkins has to give back his Best Actor Oscar for Silence of the Lambs). Reconfiguring the categories is not the way.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Eh--there are a lot of issues about how the Academy Awards are doled out. How the only type of good acting they seem to acknowledge is serious acting, how films that don't have a weighty message are discounted, how it seems every time there's a war film it wins. (Did you notice that only one of the foreign films wasn't a war film? And each of them was about a war that happened in that country? I found it amusing.)

I was just thinking about sexism on the show "Make Me a Supermodel," which has men and women competing against each other. Though it started out with an equal ratio, it's now 5 men left, only 2 women. Though part of that is that I'm sure most viewers are women and are voting to keep the beefcakes around (guilty!), I think a lot of it is that the challenges they've had are very physical and just harder for the women to do. I'm sure the challenges for male and female models are very different, but by pitting them against each other, the men have to achieve far less to be good than the women do. We'll see if it ends up being only men left.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

What Viridian said, and frankly, I'd like to see more categories rather than fewer. Specifically, for all the major awards, separate out comedies and dramas/action movies, like the Golden Globes do. Yes, it would make the awards longer, but deal with it--there's no good way to compare Ellen Page's performance in Juno with Marion Cotillards in La Vie en Rose, let alone with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in There Will Be Blood.

Plus, it might mean that someday a non-hipster comedy could get a nomination for something major again. Or the true best movie of 2007, Ratatouille, could get a nomination outside the narrow ghetto of "Best Animated Film" :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting phenomena that I've only noticed this year on Project Runway but that has been pretty endemic to that show as well. The final four of PR this year were three men and a woman. Last year, the final five were two women to three men. The final three the year a woman actually won? She was the only woman. This is a show that focuses on fitting clothes to women. (Granted, one kind only, but women without boobs or body fat are still women. Um, except for those androgen-insensitive XYs. Those are actually men.) Why don't women do at least equally as well?

I have to agree with you about the Oscars, too. Very few awards seasons pass with a true upset or with unexpected nominations, even. And you're right--certain films are penalized (see my comments above about Johnny Depp being robbed for playing Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates movie). Unless it's for special effects. That's the only area where I'd say the Oscar goes to some real, definite achievement that is better regardless of the setting. Even sound editing is subjective these days.

The only time I can remember the war movie NOT winning was when Shakespeare in Love upset Saving Private Ryan. That's also the first and last comedy in recent memory to take Best Picture (does Driving Miss Daisy count?). But being nominated for anything like comedy is as sure a sign you'll not take home the award for it as anything. Unless you're an animated movie. Because that's just a kids' award anyway. (NOTE THE SARCASM) Seriously, by banishing animated films from the Best Picture consideration, the Academy sent the message that anything remotely, potentially funny (OMG ANIMATION IS SO SILLY, RITE?) has no place being nominated. It's like how they changed Best Foreign Film to Best Film in a Language Not English. The changes to the Oscars have shown them to be as ridiculous as we've sort of always known they are.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, according to Helen Mirren on the red carpet, her next role is as a madam at a whorehouse, so there you go.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

The Academy Awards are a big incestuous clusterfuck anyway. Given that the voters are the top "artists and craftsmen" of the film industry, it's no surprise that awards are clustered toward the serious and are perhaps slightly misogynistic in nature. It's the industry patting itself on the back, which means that they, of course, don't look past the ends of their collective noses to see that the problem with females in film is that they aren't given good options. They're the ones who CREATE the options.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I just posted above my feelings about the animated feature nonsense. There will be no genre-shattering awareness of the power of animated media if it is kept aside with it's own pat-on-the-head-for-trying category. This is why Beauty and the Beast was so monumental. Because oh my God! Animated movies are GOOD MOVIES. MOVIES, PERIOD.

More categories wouldn't bother men, especially for the reasons outlined here. I do think it's hard to understand how HARD comedy is when someone can tear your heart out with a serious performance. But actors should KNOW how hard comedy is and reward that, damn it!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Fabulous. I look forward to swimming in the lake of fire as pestilence rains down upon the wicked, then.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You'd think that some of the female members would change that, but they're so mired in the system lest they be ousted from it before the career-killer birthday (40, I think) they stay quiet. It's a damn shame.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I think it could only be seen as a real problem if Best Actress was seen as somehow less prestigious than Best Actor. It isn't. By anyone. It's not a "token" award. I think what you say in your fourth paragraph about the attention paid to actresses' looks actually DOESN'T apply to the Oscars so much, but to mass media. Silly as the awards might seem sometimes, they do at least try to rise above all that. If you look back at the winners, especially in recent years (and granted I haven't seen all these movies, but based on those I do know about), most went to women who were playing strong characters. Some people just see sexism everywhere they look. (Not-starting-a-fight disclaimer: I don't mean you, I mean the author you link to.)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm also sort of baffled by the whole "best actor/actress" idea anyway. I'm sure this is my lack of theater showing, but isn't a good performance one that fully embodies the role that it's supposed to? I mean, I'm not supposed to be watching a film and thinking about the acting. And isn't a lot of what actors get credited with really writing? Or directing? Or simple physical presence? If acting is about the choices that actor made in interpreting the words, how can you know that just by watching the end product?

There are only a very few times I've watched a film and thought, "That was some damn fine acting." True, I don't see a lot of the nominated films, but I most of the time I just wonder what they're judging.

(And then I could go on about the Oscar-nominated scores. I know a lot about film scores. Sometimes you do have something like Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings score which elevates the art form, but most years there is not some revolutionary score that comes out. It's just more of the same. So what are they judging it on? Musical merit alone? Innovation? Or how well it works in the film, what it adds to the film, which is the whole point anyway.)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, as a sidenote, I was sort of horrified by the press for crucifying the writer of Juno for what she was wearing. Especially after her acceptance speech about her parents loving her as she was. Don't people think that maybe the sort of spark that made her wear jungle print to the Oscars was what made her capable of writing an Oscar-winning script? And that it's not actually a bad thing?

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

The fact that Hollywood is a "fantasy factory" that has limited roles for women is more more disturbing than sexism in their annual quasi-merit show. Maybe this is why I don't go to the movies as often as I used too (that and always missing the limited runs of smaller films).

As far as the Oscars themselves go, the idea of having a "best" actor/actress is an affront to the art and extends American hyper-competitiveness into what should be an exploration of human life. Maybe if it weren't taken so seriously I'd start to care again. Have a ceremony, celebrate your craft, have fun with it, just don't make it so damn important.

The only thing I'll say in defense of the Oscars is that it's a better filter for judging quality than nothing at all. There are a lot of older films I'd never have seen if they hadn't gotten the awards (Unforgiven and Network are good examples). For newer stuff, I'd rather just check out the Voice.

[ahab99.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy if they took the baby step of switching around the order in which they're awarded: the Best Actor award (in any number of shows, not just the Oscars) always magically seems to be awarded second, much closer the final categories of Best Director and Best Picture. Given that the entire evening is sort of built as a progression of less important to most important, it would help the cause if they could admit that Best Actor should be awarded first about, oh I don't know, half the time. And of course if they started writing an equal number of meaty and interesting roles for women, which is much closer where the real injustice in that arena starts.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

As you will no doubt have noticed on the weaker episodes of BSG, great acting can rescue terrible writing. On the other hand, terrible directing/writing can pretty much stymie good actors (hello, George Lucas). How can you tell it's great acting? Usually, that entails the actor disappearing into the role. Using my earlier for instance, I'd say that Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow is a case of GREAT acting, whereas Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd was merely really GOOD acting. The difference is that Johnny Depp ceased to exist in Pirates and it was all Jack Sparrow, whereas it was easy to see him in Sweeney in places.

Another good metric for me is how far into the character's soul did the actor take me? The fact that Daniel Day-Lewis created Plainview in There Will Be Blood such that he was interesting and compelling (if not sympathetic) and allowed you to see how his horrible deeds were done out of a deep hatred for and disappointment in everything, THAT is why he deserved to win. I can see a good performance better than I can good direction, so I can see how a good performance elevates the character from the the page.

(And don't ask me about scores. I can't figure out any of that stuff. It's all Sound Editing to me.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I hate that goddamned woman. Correction: I hate her writing. She's so condescendingly hip, I want to strangle her. She got a column in Entertainment Weekly, and so far she's written it like a blog instead of making some kind of thoughtful commentary on entertainment news (like the other writers do, even Stephen King). Her last column was "OMG NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK ARE GETTING BACK TOGETHER." Nothing about, "hey, what do you know, this boy-band thing has always been around and what's with milking nostalgia from it?" or something interesting. Just about who in the band she had a crush on, how she's sure one guy will be hard to get back, and so on. If there's anything I liked about Juno it was the performance by Michael Cera as a sweet, nerdish kid who has his pride and is able to bleed just like the rest of us. The rest of the noisy, hipster-jiving shit could have been tossed out the window, for all I care.

HOWEVER, you're totally right. She can be the most loathsome hipster trash pulp writer who thinks she's street 'cause she once flirted with rock-bottom as a stripper (and that's her sort of phrasing--the point of her stripping was to write a book about it, not because she needed the money). That doesn't give anyone the right to rip her apart for fashion. Call her a pseudo-pop-culture icon whose work is overblown and unproven beyond fluke accident, fine. The tatts and all the rest, though, leave it be.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think it could only be seen as a real problem if Best Actress was seen as somehow less prestigious than Best Actor.

Yeah, the girl in the video made it seem like a huge deal, but at the end of the night, the only thing that makes Best Actor seem any more legit/prestigious is the fact that it is announced so late in the broadcast and right before Best Picture/Director. To which I say, "Who the fuck cares? I'm already asleep by that point."

As for who won and for what and what does it say about the roles, you're also correct but it's misleading to look at the nominees and say "Hey, there are good roles! The media just makes it look like they're not." It's skewed by the fact that while you have to sift five really good performances from hundreds for the men, the women are always picking from a smaller pool. Sure, they pick great roles and good parts and acting are generally rewarded, but there are fewer to choose from in the first place.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree on any particular point, but I have to say that there will always be Oscars. People who aren't in the industry have been groomed to trust that nominees and winners are great performers doing great things. It's a marketing thing at this point, and it's not going away because it is such an effective marketing ploy (just ask my Dad: it can do no wrong if it was nominated for an Oscar).

So, while competitiveness is bad, I understand why it's going nowhere. I think that among the actors, most would like one, again because of the credibility and bankability of having one, but most true artisans would know better than to assume it makes them better or means that they are. And that's true of every artistic category from sound effects on up.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If we're trying to feng sui the Oscars so they sit right with feminism and equality, it would be best, perhaps, to do the acting awards all at once or else equally spaced out from the finale, which should remain Best Picture/Director. Then order wouldn't matter so much to my mind.

But the reason they don't just do the Best Actor/Actress together in a one-two punch is because no one cares about any other categories. People know exactly four categories maybe in each broadcast--Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress (if you're really, really good, you might know the Best Supporting). No one gives a shit about editing, sound editing, documentaries, or all the small, niche-market films, songs, crafts, or technical things. That's why they have a separate ceremony for anything less than the tremendously unspecific "Best Special Effects" et al. It's not good that people don't care about the technicians, but it's true: they don't.

[ahab99.livejournal.com]

Right, but do they always have to do Actress before Actor? I know people only care about the big awards, but it's precisely because of that that always putting Actor later is problematic. Well, that and a thousand other reasons...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The thinking might be that because they put Best Supporting Actor first, Best Actor should be last. By the theory of "first is less important, later is more," that would make Best Supporting Actor the least important acting Oscar.

Which? Might be true. I'd certainly argue that with the dearth of great female lead roles, there are so many supporting roles that are important and fabulous (whereas there are so many sausage-fest movies, there are duplicates of roles to pick a Best Supporting Actor from).

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Great acting can shine through terrible writing, and bad acting can fuck up good writing. I've been known to completely adore absolutely terribly-written shows because some of the acting choices going on were fantastic.

I am, I've been told, more aware of this kind of thing because for a long time acting was going to be my career, and I guess I've got a sharp eye for recognizing what an actor's putting in. For example: I saw There Will Be Blood, didn't find a single character in it that I could identify with, but TOTALLY thought there was some damn fine acting going on.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I agree on your last point, and didn't mean to imply that the Academy's choices represent the norm, but that the Academy should get some credit for choosing these as the best. They could just as easily have used their choices to reinforce the notion that the victim/whore/etc roles were the best.

Just be careful your talk about women in movies doesn't end up sounding like Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy's character in Bowfinger) talking about blacks in movies:
"White boys always get the Oscar. It's a known fact. Did I ever get a nomination? No! You know why? Cause I hadn't played any of them slave roles, and get my ass whipped. That's how you get the nomination. A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination, a white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That's what I need, I need to play a retarded slave, then I'll get the Oscar. Go find me that script. Buck the wonder slave!"

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know that scene was played for comedy but had, until that point, been sorta true? After that Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington won but both had only been nominated before (If I remember correctly) in subservient roles (Driving Miss Daisy, and I can't rememebr what Denzel was nominated for).

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

This is why I use the term "Oscar bait" so disparagingly -- movies that are OH SO SERIOUS and ultimately boring. That's what the Oscar goes to -- the Real Literature of the film (sorry, /cinema/) field rather than the stuff people really want to watch.

Of course, maybe I'm a philistine for thinking that our entertainments should be entertaining (without necessarily giving the Oscars each year to whatever movie has the biggest explosions).