Lip Service

Last month, the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay went to Canadian actor-turned-director Sarah Polley for her fourth feature, Women Talking. The film, based on the celebrated Miriam Toews novel of the same name deals with a group of women in a remote religious coterie debating how to respond to incidents of sexual assault they've experienced at the hands of men in their community. The filmmaker, who revealed to Vanity Fair she'd received a litany of eye-rolls at the mere mention of the film's title, was jubilant upon receiving her Oscar, thanking the Academy “...for not being mortally offended by the words ‘women’ and ‘talking' put so close together like that.” Despite her deference to the recognition and endorsement her female-led work had received, the message was clear: Women are still woefully under-represented in the cinematic arts (and not just there of course). Oscars host for the third time, comedian, writer and executive producer Jimmy Kimmel mined a similar vein whilst deriding the lack of Best Director nomination for James Cameron : “I mean, how does the Academy not nominate the guy who directed Avatar? What did they think he is, a woman?” Part of the assembled audience laughed and some commentators appreciated his brassiness in biting... well, at least nibbling the hand that feeds, whilst many didn't appreciate the joke, coming from an extremely successful white male who gets paid huge sums of money to talk.

The problem of under-representation at the Oscars (and whatever skewed microcosm of society it represents) has had a particularly bright light shone on it in recent years, thanks in part to social media, trending justifiable outrage with movements such as #OscarsSoWhite. This year saw Everything Everywhere All At Once take home seven of its 11 nominations, sweeping the big categories. The quirky sci-fi (a genre historically all-but ignored by the Academy), a multiversal exploration of intergenerational trauma in an Asian family has in part Crazy, Rich Asians to thank for kicking down the door for a huge, but woefully underrepresented group of people in the cinematic arts. The Best Supporting Actor win for Ke Huy Quan who provided youthful charm in 80's hits Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and The Goonies before having Hollywood's white picket fence built too high for his adult asian face to peer over marked a feel-good comeback neatly packaged alongside Brendan Fraser's “Brenaissance”, the popular 90's/early noughties actor forced out of Hollywood having spoken up about sexual assault, now lovingly welcomed back into the fold in the post Weinstein-era with a Best Actor win for The Whale.

The dream factory certainly loves to celebrate a redemptive third act, no matter how instrumental they may have been in the preceding misery. Whilst the 2017 best picture win for Moonlight and gongs for black actors Viola Davis and Mahershala Ali represented some recognition for people of colour following two consecutive years of all-white actor nominations, many feel this was a bone being thrown amidst controversy and public pressure and not a seismic shift in thinking. Last year's Warrior King, a historical action adventure again starring the excellent Viola Davis heading an all-black cast and helmed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, a black female director, was considered a shoe-in for several categories at this year's award, but didn't receive a single nomination.

No black female director has ever been nominated. As befits the title, the predominantly female cast of Warrior King played characters forced to fight for their ideals, but in her awards acceptance speech, Women Talking director Polley emphasised the importance of open dialogue, where people with different opinions can not just talk, but listen to each other and move forward towards resolution without violence. It's a lovely idea in a seemingly ever-more divided world, where gasoline is routinely poured on the bonfire of culture wars for cynical political sway. The purported meritocracy of the Oscars, in reality so unrepresentative of the true melting pot of society, is really the flawed pinnacle of a rigged entertainment system encompassing the Directors Guild of America, The Screen Actors Guild, Critics Groups and The Golden Globes, right back to the studios and executives financing productions.
It's saying something when linguistic analysis of Disney's wide oeuvre of princess movies shows the male characters speak far more than the female “leads”. In more recent years, hits such as Tangled, Frozen and Moana have seen the pendulum swinging toward greater female agency and feature supporting characters' vocal recognition of female characters' skills and achievements, not just their looks. Nevertheless, in the tidal wave of Marvel (Now also Disney-owned) superhero movies from the last decade and a half, it's concerning it took 21 movies to debut a female lead, (Brie Larson's Captain Marvel), 17 to feature a female villain (Thor: Ragnarok's Cate Blanchett) and the release of the first solo female-directed feature, 2021's Black Widow was essentially overshadowed by the pay dispute which led its star, Scarlet Johansson to sue her employer, a subject indicative of wider failings and institutionalized marginalization of women – and not just in Hollywood. A recently released study by the Pew Research Centre showed that in 2022, women over the age of 16 made 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, a figure which has barely changed in the last two decades.

Whether it's talkers or warriors we need, there's still some way to go before balance is achieved. Consumers can do their part by voting with their wallets. In Sweden, the Bechdel Test film classification system lets ticket buyers know if a movie is relatively free of gender bias. To get an A, a film must feature two female characters talking about something other than a man. It's a low bar, but at least it's overt recognition of an insidious issue. Systemic change begins with raising awareness. If the consumer mindset shifts, Hollywood, like so much of big business will undoubtedly see its values follow the money.

And then they'll give themselves an award for it.