Gender Neutral Awards Are A Bad Idea: Academy Award Edition

 

I’ve already made multiple commentaries over the past couple of years about how the floating of the idea of gender neutral acting categories are a horrible idea for any awards show, especially the Emmys.  The problem is, like so many terrible ideas it seems to be catching on. I already wrote in November about how this year the Independent Spirit Awards chose to give just an Acting and Supporting Acting Award not just for films, but for television. I can only console myself with the fact that, because it’s the Spirit awards, almost nobody paid attention anyone and it helped that for the first time in its history, the show was held on a streaming service and not any cable network – another trend I’m not particularly happy is continuing.

I’ve already made it very clear why this is a horrible idea for the Emmys to consider doing so, and I similarly think it’s a bad one for the Oscars to follow suit on. However, unlike with the Emmys, there are far more pitfalls awaiting if the Oscars were to do so, and given how much uproar there is about so many other aspects of the nominating process every year, there’s no indication that this would do anything but make things worse. What is particularly galling in the case of the Academy Awards is that they have a potential solution in front of them but for whatever reason, they still refuse to pull the trigger on it. So in this column I’m going to make it very clear why for the Oscars in particular, any gender neutral acting category would be a huge step backward, why it wouldn’t do anything to solve the problems it is continuously facing and what that solution might very well be.

Let’s start with something very obvious. The Oscars has always had a terrible track record getting five worthy nominees for Best Actress under normal circumstances. I could give a very long and detailed history on this subject, but I think reducing it to the thirty plus years I’ve been seriously paying attention will suffice.

Leading up to the Oscar nominations for 1992, many critics pointed the glaring irony about that year’s Academy Awards having the theme: “Year of the Woman.” Because that’s the opposite of what it was. Of the five nominated films for Best Picture, only Howard’s End had a corresponding Best Actress nominee (Emma Thompson, who eventually won). Indeed, when the nominees that year were announced many critics were outraged as to just how much work the Academy had to do in order to come up with five nominees – Catherine Deneuve’s nomination for the little seen Indochine was the most glaring example.

This has been the rule rather than the exception in the thirty years I’ve watched the show. Leading up to the 1997 Oscars, Entertainment Weekly ran out of potential nominees so quickly they couldn’t even manage to come up with a ‘Lovable Longshot’. Things got worse throughout the 2000s as studios began avoiding putting any leading actresses in their pictures and actresses had to rely almost entirely on the Independent film market to find roles that would give them a chance for an Oscar. Slowly this began to reflect in the nominees for Best Actress by the Academy: the nominees for Best Actress for both the 2010 Oscars and the Spirit Awards corresponded exactly, with Natalie Portman triumphing at both ceremonies.

The increase in nominees for Best Picture after the 2008 ceremonies did nothing to decrease this disparity, if anything they made them more glaring. It has been more of a rarity for an Oscar winning actress to star in a picture that gets nominated for Best Actress. In 2016 when Brie Larson won Best Actress her movie Room was the only film with a Best Actress nominee.) There have been aberration over the years – in 2012, four of the nominees were all in nominated films, in 2017 three were – but it is just as likely that none of the contenders for Best Actress in a given year will have a corresponding film nominated for Best Picture. (Last year, which featured three previous Oscar winners – Nicole Kidman, Olivia Colman and Penelope Cruz as well eventual winner Jessica Chastain – is an all-too-common example.)

This is my most clear-cut argument that making a gender-neutral category for Best Lead Performance (I’m going to leave out Supporting Awards because that’s not the main issue) is always going to be a struggle because the Oscars have a history almost going back to its founding of never being able to find enough ‘qualified’ nominees for Best Actress. I’ve made it clear repeatedly that I consider suggestions like this more ‘cosmetic changes’ than actual ones and I think this is the clearest example. What is ironic about it here is that the Oscars are throwing a sop to a body that will never be satisfied with anything.

Take for example a major criticism that was big this year – that there were no female nominees for Best Director. This has been a critique that keeps coming up over and over in this category because it’s become very clear that in this case, qualifications are out the window. Now I grant you the Academy’s track record with female directors is horrendous beyond description, but I’m not entirely wild about the sense of ‘we deserve this’ that has become a constant over the last five years – especially considering how prejudicial it is in other ways.

When Spike Lee received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director, there was just as much outrage about how no women had been nominated that year. More people seemed angry that Greta Gerwig had not gotten her second nomination for Best Director for Little Women in 2019 than the fact that Bong Joon-Ho had been nominated for Parasite. People calmed down after the last two years when a female director won, but the moment this year’s nominees were announced, a certain segment of the population got pissed that Sarah Polley hadn’t been nominated for Women Talking than about the qualifications of the other five nominees.

And to be clear, it’s not like women winning Best Director ever makes people happy, even for lesser awards. I remember the outrage that so many African-Americans had when Jane Campion won for Power of The Dog at the Critics Choice and when she chose to joke about how, unlike Venus and Serena ‘she always had to play with the boys.” Never mind that this was a truth that not only Campion but every female director has been dealing with for decades; she still got torched on the Internet for ‘dissing’ the Williams sisters. (Given what happened that Oscar night their presence indirectly took all attention away from what should have been Campion’s moment in the spotlight.)

And does anyone really think that putting all the actresses in the same category with actors will bring universal joy? We can’t even be happy about the actresses who are nominated right now. The moment the nominees were announced, African-American were pissed that their were no African-American nominees for Best Actress. Which, to be clear, was a way of pissing on a triumph for another minority the Academy has an even worse track record with – Asian Americans. Michelle Yeoh more than deserves to win Best Actress this year and I hope she does. But I do find it irritating beyond belief that this same circle is fundamentally more focused on the fact that Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler were ignored by the Oscars.

There’s a fable from Aesop where the moral is “if you try to please everybody, you will please nobody.” You would think after ninety-five years the Academy would get it through their heads that nothing they do will ever satisfy even a small portion of their voting population and the public in general. Even the suggestion of gender-neutral categories is a bad idea in theory, much less in practice for the Oscars and even considering it is no doubt pissing off ‘the traditionalists’ who do not like any changes.

What bothers me about this idea even in theory is that it is a cosmetic change that, at the end of the day, doesn’t really fix the larger problem. When the Academy increased the membership to include more minorities, it needed to be done and should have been done long ago. I fail to see anyway that an all-gender category does anything to change things in Hollywood.

Let’s assume this actually happens and say seven woman are nominated for Best Lead Performance and three men are. That’s a good image for the Oscars, maybe it gets them some decent PR. Now how does it help any of the other problems in Hollywood that actresses have always been facing; does it get them better roles going forward? There’s no consistent evidence that anyone winning an Oscar will guarantee you a better film career going forward. Quite the opposite; for many actors and actresses, directors and writers, the win or even a nomination may be the peak of your career. This was certainly the case for Hattie McDaniel, whose next role after winning Best Supporting Actress for Gone With The Wind was playing Aunt Jemima. And if that’s too much based on race for your comfort, winning two consecutive Best Actress Oscars famously ‘jinxed’ Luise Rainer’s career, Faye Dunaway’s career was never the same after her win for Network and Gloria Grahame’s career in Hollywood was over within a few years of her win for The Bad and the Beautiful.  The problems are not as frequent for male recipients, but it doesn’t necessary lead to continued success, after winning for The Pianist, Adrian Brody’s career never took off.

And even if that gives a few actresses more recognition then they’d get normally, how does that even address the problem that most actresses face? What guarantee is there that there will be better roles for any women going forward in films in an industry that concentrates 90 percent of its movies on franchises that are centered for teenage audiences? Will this make up for the inequality of pay that is between actors and actresses to this day and never stops failing to underwhelm us. Doing something like this will do nothing to improve the lot of the actress in Hollywood anymore than letting more minorities vote for Oscar nominations has done for African-American or Latino or any other kind of filmmaker.  It’s what the industry does best. It’s an empty gesture towards some demographic that they think it will play well towards instead of forcing them to do anything about the problems they think their addressing. (And as I’ve mentioned numerous times, in this particular case, it’s a solution that does not seem to have a problem.)

And what really angers me is that the Oscars have a solution that they can take and they seem unwilling to do it. In 2009, they announced that they would expand the Best Picture category from five nominees to ten. There were huge protests from critics and traditionalists, but they still did it – and while they’ve changed some rules, they’ve never gone back to five nominees in it.

So why not follow this to the natural end? Increase the number of nominees in every major category. Not just all the acting categories, but the writing and directing as category as well.

When the Oscars chose to expand, they were already behind the curve: in 2007 the Emmys had increased the number of nominated series in every category to six. They’ve since increased it to seven and in some cases eight. I’m not saying the Emmys get everything right (those of you who read my column every year around nomination time know how imperfect they are) but at least they understood the reality of television at the time. With the expansion of cable TV (and later streaming) the Emmys had to acknowledge that there were more quality shows out there. People still complain about the Emmy nominations, but last I checked no one thinks they should go backwards.

Other awards groups have gone in this direction: I have spoken in great admirations for both how the Broadcast Critics and the HCA TV awards have been more than willing to meet the demands of the television and expand. The Broadcast Critics, if anything, are a clearer example of this when it comes to film: they’ve always had more nominees in every category than the Oscars do, not just in all the acting categories, but every other award. Some of their choices in film have been odd, I admit, but few have been unqualified or unworthy.

In all honesty, I think the Oscars should have done this kind of expansion at the same time they were doing so for the number of nominated films: it might very well have saved them at least some of the headaches that they have been facing the last decade. They would have no doubt still been deserving of the accusations of being a racist and sexist institution (which to be clear, they have yet to prove to me they still aren’t) but it would have been the kind of cosmetic change that, frankly, is the kind of you expect Hollywood to do most of the time. It would have even been part of the grand Hollywood tradition of pretending to make changes rather than have them forced upon them.

Because let’s not kid ourselves: the Oscars still have the problems they did when they expanded the number of nominated films in 2009. All that’s changed is the number of ‘Oscar type films’ that get nominated, not the actual kind of films. That’s still pretty much the same as it was in 2009, or in 1977, or in 1929. It’s still pretty much biographies, true stories or dramas. Comedy may occasionally get invited, but it rarely wins. Horror gets invited even less, and the blockbuster action movie, the comic book movie, the movies for teenagers only, you know the movies that you can find in every theater eleven months of the year, they’re still being denied entry. Let’s not kid ourselves: Top Gun: Maverick and Way of Water shouldn’t have been invited to this party; not only are they ‘only’ action movies, but they are sequels which is sacrilege to Oscar voters. Unless you’re The Godfather movies or Lord of the Rings – motion pictures that have to big an impact on the culture to ignore – you can’t get invited if your Part 2 of anything. Sequels are everything critics hate, therefore we shouldn’t even invite them to the Oscars. That, by the way, is the real reason Triangle of Sadness was nominated for Best Picture and Wakanda Forever wasn’t. The Academy had already exceeded its quota of blockbusters and we can’t let another sequel, much less a Marvel movie, get in.

That’s what everybody should be outraged about every time the nominees for the Oscars for announced. A lot of groups – like in every other aspect of America – always complain that when it comes to them, they are never seen by Hollywood. The bigger problem is that every year when it come to the Oscars, you can usually say  the same for practically every nominated film or actor. I’ve made that argument before in several of my articles on both the Oscars and criticisms of Hollywood, and to be clear, everyone in Hollywood – whether they be Latino, Asian-American, African-American, LGBTQ+, female, and yes, white cis males – are all guilty in keeping the lie alive that the films you make that no one can see or find anywhere are more important and superior than the ones that we find in the multiplex.

All I’m saying to the Academy is that before you decide to make all gender acting categories, why not consider expanding the nominees in the acting categories you already have? I admit, maybe you’ll nominate more of the same actors you do for the films you already do. But at least by having more nominees, you might get some more women directors or African-American actors or other minority performers in any category without having to do anything so drastic. Who knows? If you had this system in place this year, maybe no one would be complaining. Maybe you’d have nominated Sarah Polley for Best Director or Viola Davis for Best Actress or, I don’t know, Tom Cruise for Top Gun: Maverick.  Before you entirely reinvent the wheel, maybe think of modifying the version you have just a little.

It's just my suggestion. It might not be as perfect as the one that has led to Best Pictures such as Green Book or The Artist, and acting winners such as Roberto Benigni and Jean Dujardin, but I offer all the same.