Why the Oscars Should Do Away With Gender

With the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics Choice Awards and BAFTAs now behind us, all that is left of 2022’s major film awards is the big enchilada—the Academy Awards, airing March 27. So, it’s as good a time as any to raise a question that’s been asked before, but never really answered, and to advocate for a change that’s frankly long overdue: Why are acting awards gendered? And, at a moment in history when men and women compete in myriad arenas, including for awards, when culture is moving beyond the binary in increasing ways, isn’t it high time that practice should change?

At all of the three aforementioned awards ceremonies, Will Smith has steamrolled the Best Actor competition for his performance in King Richard, and in a late-season surge, Jessica Chastain, considered a dark horse for Best Actress earlier in the year for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, has taken two out of three prizes. The supporting awards also have clear frontrunners in West Side Story’s Ariana Debose and CODA’s Troy Kotsur. On the television side, Jason Sudeikis, Jean Smart and Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae and Jung Ho-yeon were among the winners at the SAGs and Critics Choice.

But a few weeks back, when I was voting in the SAGs, I thought, as I do in some variation every year, is there any good reason that Nicole Kidman and Jessica Chastain shouldn’t be competing against Will Smith and Andrew Garfield? That Denzel Washington isn’t going up against Olivia Colman, or Kodi Smit-McPhee against Kirsten Dunst? The short answer is no—there are no good reasons, but there are reasons all the same.

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I want no kudos for a brainstorm, as it’s a glaringly obvious question. But just because it’s simple to question the logic of segregating acting awards by gender, it’s also instructive to look at why film, television and theater awards cling so stubbornly to the practice, and are unlikely to give it up. We can talk until The Power of the Dog’s cows come home about whether there ought to be competition at all in art and culture, or even whether, in the immortal 1997 words of Fiona Apple, “this world is bullshit”—but it exists, and the awards exist, so it’s fair to ask the question.

Apart from sports, which are another conversation, there are no areas of culture in which males and females virtually never compete against one another for awards except acting. Not in literature, visual art, science, architecture, or politics—the still-unbroken “highest glass ceiling” of elected office notwithstanding.

And in music? This year marks a decade since the Grammys did away with gendering in their genre-based vocal performance categories, including pop, rock, R&B, and country. While that was part of an effort by the Recording Academy to reduce the bloated number of gramophone-eligible categories (it’s still north of 80), the effect was to de-gender the Grammys altogether. (In the “Big Four” categories of Record, Album and Song of the Year, and Best New Artist, men and women always competed head-to-head.) The BRIT Awards dropped gendered categories this year, and in 2017 the MTV Video Music Awards did away with its Best Male Video and Best Female Video categories in favor of the non-gendered Artist of the Year. The American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, BET Awards, Soul Train Music Awards and CMAs all maintain a mix of gendered and non-gendered prizes. At the AMAs, the question of whether or not to gender seems to reflect where the artists are: in the more female-populated genres of pop, R&B and country, there are separate male and female awards, but only one, non-gendered solo category for hip-hop, Latin, and rock.

But back to acting. “Great acting is great acting, no matter what the gender or non-gender,” MTV’s Amy Doyle told The Hollywood Reporter five years ago, in announcing that the MTV Movie & TV Awards was eliminating gender-based categories. Doyle added that the change illustrated the channel’s forward-facing audience “uniformly rejecting obsolete labels and embracing fluidity.” Hear, hear! But good luck getting that kind of thinking to fly in the halls of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Oscars’ broadcast partner ABC, or, for that matter, at any of the “adult” acting awards. Say what you will about the golden popcorn, MTV remains ahead of the cultural curve.

Of course, in all other disciplines of movie, TV and theater awards, there is no gender-based segregation—not for directors, writers, cinematographers, editors or designers. Only acting. Apparently, there is something about acting that makes erasing gender from awards—so that the only distinction is between lead and supporting performances, or in the case of the awards that do it, comedy and drama—such a non-starter.

Whenever this, to my mind, sensible, modest proposal is brought up, the objections generally come down to three areas: (1) that if men and women competed against one another for Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, BAFTAs and Golden Globes, the result would be an XY tsunami, in which women would hardly stand a chance; (2) the inequality of acting opportunity in Hollywood and beyond is so skewed in favor of men that having separate female categories is necessary; and (3) that no one, from award show producers to networks to the public, wants to see any change that could potentially decrease the number of stars on stage or on a red carpet in a designer gown.

To the last point first. There’s no reason to think going gender neutral would exclude anyone from the party. That concern is easily enough allayed by doubling the number of nominees in each category. In the case of many awards, including the Academy Awards, that would mean going from five to ten—the same number of nominees that now contend for the Best Picture Oscar. If reducing the number of categories is a concern, add a new category or two! The Critics Choice Awards have an ungendered “Best Young Actor/Actress” category (Belfast's young lead Jude Hill won it this year), as do France’s César Awards, though they are gendered into two “Most Promising” young actor and actress. And as many have pointed out, an Oscar for stunt performers is long overdue. The SAGs do it. God knows stunts contribute immeasurably to the movies loved by the popcorn crowd that the Oscar broadcast covets so much, and they deserve their flowers.

But of course, it’s precisely that populist impulse that helps doom any proposal to eliminate gendered acting awards, at least at the Oscars. Every year, AMPAS seems to tie itself up in knots over the awards moving ever further away from Joe Multiplex—toward arthouse dramas, serious biopics, and more international fare (subtitles! the horror!)—and comes up with ham-handed ways to offset the trend in an effort to gin up cratering TV ratings. This year’s for-the-masses gimmicks are an #OscarsFanFavorite award poll, in partnership with Twitter, and the recently announced, shameful move of relegating eight awards to a pre-broadcast ceremony, meaning that categories involving short films, design and editing will get a truncated, “cut the fat” version of prime-time shine, presumably to make room for more MCU blockbuster previews. An awards ceremony that seems hell-bent on driving its show into a ratings-chasing ditch is unlikely to go for a change that would be seen by much of red America as wokeness run amok. “Get this,” one can practically hear Laura Ingraham inveighing, “Hollywood wants you to think there’s no difference between men and women!”

While there is no difference between men and women in the performance of acting, there is an undeniable and quantifiable difference in real-world compensation for it—the pay gap in film and TV is notorious and persistent—and in sheer opportunities for work, particularly for older roles and leading roles, though on that last point things appear to be improving. A 2020 survey showed the number of lead roles for women still trailing men, 50.5 percent male to 47.8 percent female—but a dramatic increase from nine years earlier, when the figure was nearly 75 percent male. (There appeared, unsurprisingly, to be a correlation between the figure and an increase in films written and directed by women.) So, better—but not where it should be.

There are those who believe that Hollywood’s systemic gender inequality alone is reason enough to justify carving out acting awards that are reserved for women. But surely the answer to improving the status quo is writing and producing more and better roles for women, including women over 40, not gender-based segregation for acting awards. The idea of separate Oscars for actors and actresses was never to be a corrective for a sexist industry, yet some see it as serving that worthy, if unintended, purpose. For me, in 2022 it’s hard to see it as progressive, and not pandering. Unless of course, you subscribe to that third idea—that having ungendered acting awards would mean the guys would win everything.

I think that theory is nonsense. Where’s the evidence that voters—for the Oscars, Emmys, BAFTAs, Tonys, SAGs, Globes, Critics Choice or any other acting awards—are naturally more inclined to vote for any given man? At the 2021 Oscars, Best Actress went to the favorite, Frances McDormand, for Nomadland. Best Actor, you’ll recall, went to The Father’s Anthony Hopkins—such an upset over the expected winner and sentimental favorite, the late Chadwick Boseman, that for the first time the show moved Best Actor to the final award of the night. Can we necessarily surmise that if the leading men and women had all been competing against each other, that McDormand would still have won? Maybe not. But maybe so.

What about last year’s Emmys? I feel pretty sure that as long as Ted Lasso is on the air, Jason Sudeikis will continue to win awards for it, so projecting that he would have beaten the winner of Best Actress in a Comedy Series, Jean Smart of Hacks, had they gone head-to-head, might be a safe bet. But you never know what combining those five and five into one ten-person category would do until you do it. In the Emmys’ drama categories, it was really all-The Crown-all-the-time, so whether Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles or Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II would come out on top is kind of a wash, no? Unless Crown voters cancel each other out, and an Uzo Aduba or Billy Porter takes the prize? A-ha!

So, just because it’s a fun exercise, let’s game out the upcoming Academy Awards using this year’s nominees, with not four but TWO gender-neutral acting categories. For Outstanding Acting Performance in a Leading Role, the ten nominees, in alphabetical order are:

Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos

Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter

Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog

Andrew Garfield, tik...tik…boom!

Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos

Will Smith, King Richard

Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

While this might feel like an even more wide-open field than when gender-separated, there is a favorite. In the gendered Oscar race, oddsmakers now have Will Smith as a near-prohibitive favorite for Best Actor, and SAG and Critics Choice winner Chastain seems to be pulling away from Olivia Colman and Nicole Kidman, probably her closest competition. Combined into one gender-free group like this, the voting pattern could change, but you have to still like Smith’s chances against any rival, male or female. Garfield and tik..tik…boom! have passionate supporters, and the indie-inclined might go for Colman or even Cruz, who already picked up several critics’ prizes for Parallel Mothers. And there’s Stewart, who seemed an early favorite but failed—sadly—to get a SAG nomination and saw her fortunes fall. With this ten-person field, the one nominee you wouldn’t bet against is the man who embodied Venus and Serena Williams’ famously driven and stubborn father, Richard. (The superstar sisters even accompanied the King Richard team to the Critics Choice Awards.) The greatest performance yet from an actor who still inspires a lot of good… will. Fun fact: SIX of the ten nominated performances are for playing real-life individuals, only one of them still alive. The biopic—true-to-life or not—is alive and well.

As for the post-gender race for Outstanding Acting Performance in a Supporting Role, we have:

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter

Ariana DeBose, West Side Story

Judi Dench, Belfast

Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog

Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Ciarán Hinds, Belfast

Troy Kotsur, CODA

Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog

J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos

Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

First of all, how strange that when you put them all together alphabetically by surname, the five women nominees are listed before the five men. What are the odds? In mid-February, I would have said there were much better odds that this ten-person imaginary race comes down to two names: Ariana DeBose, for her spitfire turn as Anita, the Puertorriqueña queen of West Side Story; and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who captivates as Peter, a frontier twink with a talent for paper flowers and cunning revenge in The Power of the Dog. The two had won the majority of the supporting awards in the lead-up to the SAGs, but then Troy Kotsur, in his moving performance as the deaf father of a hearing daughter in CODA, took the supporting actor trophy, did the same at the BAFTAs and Critics Choice, and now feels like the man to beat at the Oscars.

But do away with the gender distinction? The supporting Oscar is still so much of a lock for DeBose that you could engrave the statuette now. Kotsur and Smit-McPhee were excellent, as were Aunjanue Ellis, quietly powerful in King Richard, and Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter. But this is DeBose’s to lose, whether competing against four women or nine men and women. If you want to bet the farm on anything at this year’s Oscars, it’s DeBose taking home that genital-free gold man.

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“So really, what’s the point of all this?” you may be asking. “Aren’t you just taking away two peoples’ chances to shine? If it ain’t broke and all…”

But it is broken. It’s been broken from the start if actors and only actors, alone among film, TV and theatrical artists, are separated by gender when it comes to awards for their achievements. How do you argue in favor of separate acting awards for men and women but not in favor of gender segregation for directors, DPs and more?

The SAGs—whose very trophy is called “The Actor”—have since their inception offered a nod toward progressive language by eschewing the word “actress” in favor of “female actor,” and yet they still separate by gender. If you can’t get your union behind a move toward un-gendering, it’s unlikely to go very far anywhere else. Even the Independent Spirit Awards, for all its progressivism, is perfectly comfortable with such categories as “Male Lead” and “Female Lead”.

Why this is seen by some as such a radical proposal is bonkers to me. If Justin Bieber, Brandi Carlile, Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo, Jon Batiste, Doja Cat and more can all go head-to-head for this year’s Record of the Year Grammy, why is it so unthinkable that Javier Bardem, Kristen Stewart, Nicole Kidman and Benedict Cumberbatch could compete for the same Oscar? The Academy Awards lately seem keen to remind us that change is a good thing. So, here’s a change that actually makes sense, and is rooted not in ratings, but in principle.

To the Oscars and all its awards show relatives, it’s time to break the binary.