This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

This year’s movie awards season witnessed the emergence of a new dogma. Back in 2016 it was #OscarsSoWhite. Then in 2018, after the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases and the #MeToo movement, came Time’s Up — the challenge to male sexual harassment and abuse. The latest concept, born out of the transgender culture wars, is gender-neutral acting categories.

The Gothams, awarded by the Gotham Film & Media Institute in New York, were the first to announce the introduction of gender-neutral acting categories in August 2021, replacing Best Actor and Best Actress with Outstanding Lead Performance and Outstanding Supporting Performance.

Last August, the Independent Spirit Awards (founded in 1984 and dedicated to independent films with budgets below a specified figure — now $30 million) decided to switch to gender-neutral acting categories. Its electorate includes film festival programmers as well as filmmaking professionals, and its nominating committees are 50 per cent female, 6 per cent non-binary, 3 per cent transgender, and 61 per cent BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). On top of that, 32 per cent identify as LGBTQ+ and 8 per cent identify as PWD (people with disabilities). 

Their chosen nominees in the new gender-neutral category for Best Lead Performance included five women and five men, but it did not include the Oscars Best Actor frontrunner Brendan Fraser for his performance as a morbidly obese man in The Whale. Why so, when they included a couple of male performances that have made little impression elsewhere? 

The reason seems obvious. They could accept Cate Blanchett in Tár losing to Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once, or vice versa, but they could not accept both of them losing to Fraser (who, of course, is not a PWD but only plays one). Male and pale is out.

This awards season has allowed us to see the logical contortions of gender-neutral categories from a different perspective. The British pop music industry is not predominantly pale, but it remains dominated by male performers. The Brits main award went gender neutral last year. Of the 71 acts which qualified for this gender-neutral award, only 13 were female or non-binary, and all five nominees were men. Cue indignation from feminists, and rightly so.

Imagine if pale males walked away with both Outstanding Performance awards

Across the English Channel, in France, progressive filmmakers were heading in a different direction. At the 48th César awards ceremony in Paris on 23rd February the five directors chosen by the 4,705 voting members of the César academy were all male, and this despite Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Les Enfants des Autres, Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon, and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer being critical successes. (This in spite of the fact that of the 520 new members of the César Academy, 69 per cent are women.) As a result, Marie-Charlotte Garin, a French Green MEP, has suggested that someone should found the Cléopâtre awards for women. So now we have a new hashtag: #CesarsSoMale.

Then in December of last year the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board came out against the “industry shibboleth” of gendered acting categories, and there were murmurings that the British Academy of Film and Television Arts is being nudged in the same direction, with director Sam Mendes telling a BBC interviewer he thought it was inevitable.

The Brits went down the gender-neutral path because organisers were embarrassed that they had no award allowing the non-binary singer, Sam Smith, to compete within its parameters, and The Crown actress Emma Corrin, also non-binary, has said “it’s difficult for me at the moment trying to justify in my head being non-binary and being nominated in female categories”. She has even expressed puzzlement over the fact that she is not offered male roles. (Whisper it: because her looks confine her to playing elfin boys.) 

Of course, it’s the non-binary bit that is causing the problem. After all, Jaye Davidson, a pre-op transsexual, was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for The Crying Game as far back as 1992. The latest proposed compromise is for gender-neutral acting categories to have two winners, thus ensuring the possibility of gender balance while not offending those pesky non-binaries.

So we face the prospect of the remaining hold-outs against gender-neutral acting categories — the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Academy — being bullied into submission. If the Academy is foolish enough to follow this trend, it would be well advised not to introduce it for next year’s Oscars, since that event is likely to be dominated by two epic movies which have Oscar written all over them and which contain big, meaty roles for men: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo di Caprio, with Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons in supporting roles. Marlowe, directed by Neil Jordan, is looking good for Liam Neeson. Imagine what a Diversity disaster it would be if pale males walked away with both Outstanding Performance awards.

As Sasha Stone has written on her Awardsdaily website, the achievements of Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh in Tár and Everything Everywhere All At Once respectively:

Are more than great acting — the characters depicted are wives and mothers, women struggling to meet unequal expectations in a male-dominated world. These are parts defined by their explorations of womanhood, elevated by great actresses with the irreplaceable experience of being women. The same may be said on the other side of the equation — Colin Farrell’s and Bill Nighy’s respective performances in The Banshees of Inisherin and Living are likewise rooted in their irreplaceable experiences as men … If the biological differences between men and women are sufficient to justify sex-segregated sports, how much greater are divergent life experiences a justification for the proud tradition of Best Actor and Best Actress?

Hopefully this fever-dream will pass. After all, someone pointed out to me that there was not a single reference to saving the planet from ecological disaster at the 2023 Oscars, which had been a growing cause in the years prior to the pandemic.

On Oscars night 2023 there were several unintentionally memorable moments: when one of the Daniels — the co-directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once share the same first name — thanked not only his mom but “moms everywhere” (what about dads?); when the other Daniel insisted drag acts were not a threat to anyone (a reference to the drag queen storytelling phenomenon); the scowl on the face of Angela Bassett when she lost out to self-professed “nepo baby” Jamie Lee Curtis as Best Supporting Actress; and the standing ovation given to Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer who won for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. 

Best of all, however, was the figure who caught my eye a few times in the area reserved for nominees and their significant others. She was a statuesque woman whose floaty white dress rose up behind her head like a swirling cloud. It turned out to be Academy Award nominee Tems wearing a gown from Lever Couture. The man sitting next to her was having trouble peering around the edge of the cloud. “Hate to be the brother next to Tems in the Oscar audience,” tweeted Eric Hinton. “Fighting for his life.” Not to mention the poor folks sitting behind her. That seemed like a macro-aggression to me.