• From: Van Dieman's Land
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Topic: Best Actress Award??

I'd thought I'd ask you guys to kick this one round, with Award Season coming up...

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

Book awards that are just for women are controversial, with many arguments for and against. But the standard feminist response is that women are equal and therefore women authors should compete equally with male authors. It's somewhat patronising that they have to have their own separate category, like the Paralympics.

So what do you guys reckon?

Should there just be a Best Actor category, open to all? Let Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench slug it out with Daniel Day Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman? After all, there are already too many award shows and award categories e.g. Best Kiss FFS.

Or keep things the way they are? It's the way it's always been, so leave it alone.

Or create even more categories? Best Child actor. Best geriatric. Best Hispanic Dwarf Amputee in a Transgender Role?

not long to go now...

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  • From: Norway
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Equal or not, some roles are really only playable by women, and vice versa. Whereas a female director could do as good a job as a male, some actresses could easily portray a better woman than most men.

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  • Teague
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Dividing it into genders is kind of fucked up, sure. But here's the thing: it's more that the entire situation is fucked up, and the "dividing genders" solution is the fairest triage in the meantime. I feel sort of the same way about affirmative action. "Is this fucked up?" "Yes." "Would stopping it make the situation better?" "Well... no. Not by itself, no. That'd probably be worse. You have to do more than that."

From whom do most of the best performances come? For whom do most of the best parts get written? Hell, by whom are most of the scripts written? It's all dudes. It's a general institutionalized guy-thing, like everywhere else. It's not that there's more-betterer male actors, or writers, or anything. It's that the movie industry is still largely a bunch of dudes, telling stories about other dudes, to other dudes. Women get the short-shrift systemically.

So, we could make one tiny little "fair" move in this overall scenario, and say "men and women should be treated equally, goddamnit, so they're all in one actor category now!" And on paper, that would be fairer. But that's in a vacuum, that's not real life - if we made that one change right now, while the rest of the situation is moving so much more slowly toward equilibrium, virtually no women would win Best Actor. It's not that all the great actresses on Earth would die overnight, it's that we'd suddenly be beholden to the schedule of the larger system evening out. We'd be waiting on the entire industry to become Actually Fair. Where great women writers are selling great scripts with great parts for great women actors that'll be voted on by great swaths of female actors in the category. Same as the guys.

And god knows how long that'll take.

Honestly, the one that bugs me is "comedienne." But whatever.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

It doesn't bother me too much. If you have both genders competing for the same award, you'll inevitably have a scenario where more men are being nominated than women. So what do you do then? You change the rules so that there has to be an equal number of male and female nominees. Basically, you have the same thing that you have now.

If there's a problem with the Best Actress category, it's the types of performances which get nominated. You see it all the time. Best Actor is filled with powerful, moving performances, capital-A Acting type stuff. This year you'll get Chiwetel Ejiofor, Robert Redford, Bruce Dern, maybe Tom Hanks. Best Actress, though? It's always stuff that's more showy than subtle. You know who's not going to be nominated for Best Actress this year? Brie Larson. Adele Exarchopoulos. Greta Gerwig. Margot Robbie. The women who actually gave fantastic performances. You know who probably will be nominated? Meryl Streep, for wearing a wig and shouting. Cate Blanchett, for being neurotic and loud. Sandra Bullock, for screaming and being scared. These aren't bad performances. They're very good, actually. But the Academy, for reasons that are beyond me, rarely nominates women who give thoughtful, subtle, passionate, affecting performances, in favor of women who give Big Performances. Not that they don't do this for actors too, but it's much more apparent in Best Actress.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Tomahawk wrote:

Equal or not, some roles are really only playable by women, and vice versa. Whereas a female director could do as good a job as a male, some actresses could easily portray a better woman than most men.

You can see where this line of argument ends, though.... If you're adapting Othello or a biopic of Muhammad Ali, only a black actor can play it. But you're not going to create an award category only open to black actors, are you? Some roles can only be played by children, but we don't have a child actor Academy Award.

Last edited by avatar (2014-01-06 18:15:25)

not long to go now...

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:
Tomahawk wrote:

Equal or not, some roles are really only playable by women, and vice versa. Whereas a female director could do as good a job as a male, some actresses could easily portray a better woman than most men.

You can see where this line of argument ends, though.... If you're adapting Othello or a biopic of Muhammad Ali, only a black actor can play it. But you're not going create an award category only open to black actors, are you? Some roles can only be played by children, but we don't have a Child Actor Oscar.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure that it's entirely equivalent.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Doctor Submarine wrote:
avatar wrote:
Tomahawk wrote:

Equal or not, some roles are really only playable by women, and vice versa. Whereas a female director could do as good a job as a male, some actresses could easily portray a better woman than most men.

You can see where this line of argument ends, though.... If you're adapting Othello or a biopic of Muhammad Ali, only a black actor can play it. But you're not going create an award category only open to black actors, are you? Some roles can only be played by children, but we don't have a Child Actor Oscar.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure that it's entirely equivalent.

Why not? If women get their own category because only women can play women, then why don't blacks get their own category because only blacks can play blacks?

Of course, there's Tootsie. And Lawrence of Arabia - where Obi Wan blacked himself up.

Shakespeare in Love: Gwyneth plays a woman playing a man playing a woman. And getting an Oscar for it, universally regarded as a weak, undeserved, performance, precisely what you were talking about in your post.

Yeah, lots of arguments for and against, and no one solution feels entirely satisfactory, as Teague elegantly said.

Last edited by avatar (2014-01-06 19:17:52)

not long to go now...

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:
Doctor Submarine wrote:
avatar wrote:

You can see where this line of argument ends, though.... If you're adapting Othello or a biopic of Muhammad Ali, only a black actor can play it. But you're not going create an award category only open to black actors, are you? Some roles can only be played by children, but we don't have a Child Actor Oscar.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure that it's entirely equivalent.

Why not? If women get their own category because only women can play women, they why don't blacks get their own category because only blacks can play blacks?

Well, there was that whole "separate but equal" thing, so it would be a tough sell.

Look, we could endlessly subdivide categories so that everyone gets a fair shake, or we could turn it into one category and make it super exclusive. You can't do the former, because it defeats the purpose of a prestigious award. And if you do the latter, people are going to be shut out. Separating the acting awards by gender compensates a little bit for the inherent discrimination in the industry without compromising the "integrity" of the Academy Award. In theory, I see the issue with this. But in practice, it doesn't make sense to do anything else.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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  • From: Norway
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Re: Best Actress Award??

I've seen films where the script calls for a black person, but the actor is white.



---And of course, there's always Cloud Atlas.

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  • Lamer
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:

why don't blacks get their own category because only blacks can play blacks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BET_Awards

Tomahawk wrote:

I've seen films where the script calls for a black person, but the actor is white.

Django Unchained starring Hugh Grant wink

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  • From: Buffalo, NY
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

So they can give away two awards.

Remember, the Academy Awards only exist as PR tools. They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!". By having four acting categories, they can highlight four different actors, two of each gender. A year in which no women are nominated would be horrible PR, hence the two female categories.

I write stories! With words!
http://www.asstr.org/~Invid_Fan/

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Invid wrote:
avatar wrote:

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

So they can give away two awards.

Remember, the Academy Awards only exist as PR tools. They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!". By having four acting categories, they can highlight four different actors, two of each gender. A year in which no women are nominated would be horrible PR, hence the two female categories.

Sometimes there are FIVE acting awards, if you include their Special Award or Honorary Award or Lifetime Achievement Award or Whatever the Fuck it's Called Award.

not long to go now...

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:
Invid wrote:
avatar wrote:

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

So they can give away two awards.

Remember, the Academy Awards only exist as PR tools. They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!". By having four acting categories, they can highlight four different actors, two of each gender. A year in which no women are nominated would be horrible PR, hence the two female categories.

Sometimes there are FIVE acting awards, if you include their Special Award or Honorary Award or Lifetime Achievement Award or Whatever the Fuck it's Called Award.

That shouldn't count, because it's not a competition like the others.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Invid wrote:
avatar wrote:

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

So they can give away two awards.

Remember, the Academy Awards only exist as PR tools. They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!". By having four acting categories, they can highlight four different actors, two of each gender. A year in which no women are nominated would be horrible PR, hence the two female categories.

The Golden Globes are even worse. I lost count of all the acting awards, as they're divided up into further sub-categories... comedy, drama, TV, Best Actor in a Period Drama set between 1465 - 1815, Best Actress in a Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Action Cyber-Punk Thriller involving Two Magic Beans or Less.

Just one acting award. Best actor of the year. Open to anyone. Then it'd be worth something.

not long to go now...

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:
Invid wrote:
avatar wrote:

Question: Why is there a Best Actress category? Shouldn't women compete equally with men? After all, there's no Best Female Director, or Best Female Composer Award.

So they can give away two awards.

Remember, the Academy Awards only exist as PR tools. They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!". By having four acting categories, they can highlight four different actors, two of each gender. A year in which no women are nominated would be horrible PR, hence the two female categories.

The Golden Globes are even worse. I lost count of all the acting awards, as they're divided up into further sub-categories... comedy, drama, TV, Best Actor in a Period Drama set between 1465 - 1815, Best Actress in a Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Action Cyber-Punk Thriller involving Two Magic Beans or Less.

Just one acting award. Best actor of the year. Open to anyone. Then it'd be worth something.

But then you'd have to nominate the same number of people anyway to get a fair spread. So you're left with a four-category division. There's nothing wrong with this system that can be fixed by collapsing categories.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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  • paulou
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Invid wrote:

They started so studios could say to the public, "hey, we're also doing art here!".

Well, no.

"I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them ... If I got them cups and awards they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created".

-Louis B Mayer

Last edited by paulou (2014-01-13 16:57:12)

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  • From: Van Dieman's Land
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Re: Best Actress Award??

Teague wrote:

Dividing it into genders is kind of fucked up, sure. But here's the thing: it's more that the entire situation is fucked up, and the "dividing genders" solution is the fairest triage in the meantime. I feel sort of the same way about affirmative action. "Is this fucked up?" "Yes." "Would stopping it make the situation better?" "Well... no. Not by itself, no. That'd probably be worse. You have to do more than that."

From whom do most of the best performances come? For whom do most of the best parts get written? Hell, by whom are most of the scripts written? It's all dudes. It's a general institutionalized guy-thing, like everywhere else. It's not that there's more-betterer male actors, or writers, or anything. It's that the movie industry is still largely a bunch of dudes, telling stories about other dudes, to other dudes. Women get the short-shrift systemically.

So, we could make one tiny little "fair" move in this overall scenario, and say "men and women should be treated equally, goddamnit, so they're all in one actor category now!" And on paper, that would be fairer. But that's in a vacuum, that's not real life - if we made that one change right now, while the rest of the situation is moving so much more slowly toward equilibrium, virtually no women would win Best Actor. It's not that all the great actresses on Earth would die overnight, it's that we'd suddenly be beholden to the schedule of the larger system evening out. We'd be waiting on the entire industry to become Actually Fair. Where great women writers are selling great scripts with great parts for great women actors that'll be voted on by great swaths of female actors in the category. Same as the guys.

And god knows how long that'll take.

Honestly, the one that bugs me is "comedienne." But whatever.

If there was only ONE acting category, open to all, then I think a woman, Cate Blanchett, would win it over the men this year.

not long to go now...

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  • From: Farmington, CT
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Re: Best Actress Award??

avatar wrote:

If there was only ONE acting category, open to all, then I think a woman, Cate Blanchett, would win it over the men this year.

I completely disagree, and that's part of the problem I mentioned earlier. I think Ejiofor, McConaughey, or DiCaprio would still win in a landslide. Because the best female performances this year were totally ignored.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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