A Kinder, More Neutered Oscar?

A commentary that I heard on NPR yesterday by Bob Mondello reminded me of this article from 2009 in the Washington Post by Monica Hesse: both articles essentially speculate on whether the Best Actor/Actress categories should be collapsed into one Best Performer category.

Regardless of my own personal thoughts on the issue, I'm pretty sure this is an idea the academy won't be pursuing anytime soon. What with the flagging interest in the broadcast and the huge industry that's grown out of coverage of the red carpets and dresses, frankly there's NO WAY that AMPAS would make a move that would risk in any way lessening it's star power - that's just about the only thing the broadcast has going for it!  Fewer A-list actors? Fewer gowns? Fewer designers? Not a chance!

Let's face it:  as long as roles are written with gender in mind -  Chris, male, 30s or Pat, female, mid-twenties - there will always be   gendered categories for acting, and so long as you have that there will be a strong argument for gendered categories come awards time.  You can't compare it to other categories: no other professionally-based categories have the explicit gendering that acting does.  The egalitarian in me agrees in principle with Mondello and Hesse - I think it's a good idea to collapse categories and have men and women alike acknowledged as performers first - but so long as the number of lead roles for women in films is relatively small percentage wise, this somehow seems like it would be a setback. Furthermore, I speculate that in practice the studios would want to hedge their bets - if they had a strong male and female leads but the woman had fewer scenes, she would be put forth for Best Performer in a Supporting Role. This could lead to a trend of men in the Best Performer category, and women filling the Best Supporting Performer category, truly making the second sex, second class. But then maybe there would be a big backlash, and  studios would develop more big budget, serious, meaty films with female leads. And then maybe it would all work out.

Whew, all this idealism vs pragmatism makes my head hurt. And, as I said before, it's a little pointless, since things won't change in the forseeable future. Pessimism in the face of entrenched ideologies wins out in the end I suppose. Sigh.

-TVB