There were quite a few comments the other day wondering why we hadn't shared the news that Berlinale, one of the world's top film festivals, will no longer be giving out separate Best Actress and Best Actor prizes. Instead they'll now be giving out two genderless acting prizes, one for a leading role and one for a supporting role. The reason we hadn't yet shared the news is that we found it self-sabotaging and depressing. A disclaimer before we continue: Before yet another angry comment explosion wherein we're accused of not having any perspective -- 'the world is burning, who cares about movie awards,' etcetera, you know the drill -- we must state upfront that we're fully aware that film awards are not the most important thing going on in the world. To which we must also state "duh!" reflectively and pre-emptively. But this is a film site, and a film site that is obsessed with film awards so please just let us do our thing. If you want to read about the world burning, you're at the wrong website anyway. This one is built for talking about arts and entertainment with a heavy emphasis on the filmed kind.
Now let's continue to the Berlinale topic...
One of our great joys in life has always been film awards. They can be maddening, sure, but they're also fun and glamorous, and we'd argue an important piece of cultural history when it comes to the arts. Through awards, whether they're audience polls, sales driven, selectively juried, or voted on by large invite-only groups, you can often see what industries and the general public and the critical community valued in art, what styles of performance they cherished, and even which countries were in vogue and the like. It's endlessly fascinating. This is why any movement to reduce this great pleasure is upsetting.
Those who share the view that acting should be genderless are likely praising the decision and we understand, at least in part, why. Gender doesn't determine skill or worth as an actor (though we'd argue that generally speaking women are better actors, perhaps because they're more practiced at meeting more complex emotional demands within the roles they're given) and more people are identifying as non-binary. So why shouldn't awards be free of gender? Or as Berlinale puts it "gender sensitive". It's a reasonable question except that it ignores the subjectivity of awards in the first place. It also ignores that gender equality already exists in the traditional film awards system for actors (except for the small percentage of actors who don't want to be considered men or women).
All awards for art are, by their nature, completely subjective. There can be no single "best" and there can't even really be two "bests" or even five to ten bests as no one will ever agree on what "best" means. Gender is just a handy and, yes, binary way to divvy things up. And we'd argue that you do have to divvy awards up in some way to attempt even the tiniest sliver of objectivity within a subjective contest. Even within the current binary method of Best Actress and Best Actor prizes you're still comparing apples to oranges within those separate fields. Once you've combined all of them, you have apples and oranges and .. oh, let's say, meat products since men and women rarely play the same kind of role. And even within both male and female acting prizes, as movie prizes have been splitting them for nearly a century, you can easily see the misogyny and patriarchy of the world in the types of roles that are honored (i.e. valued). Having male and female actors compete together in a single category will not remove these biases. What's more it will absolutely decrease gender equality, since as it stands now, acting awards in most organizations honor an exactly equal amount of men and women.
What's more if you don't divvy up categories, you're limiting the prizes that can be given for leading performances which is a strangely stingy stance for any kind of arts organization. For a film festival it seems particularly odd since they have such limited cultural power to begin with. Now, the Television Critics Association has famously gone gender-free in their awards for years. And while they've historically preferenced female actors for the win, they've honored far fewer actors in total, of either sex (given their very small amount of prizes). And, given that the world is still so sexist, we absolutely do not believe that women would be as frequently honored as men in the hands of other much larger voting bodies. The perfect obvious example of this is the enormous gender disparity in Honorary Oscars and most below-the-line Oscar categories (which are all genderless) which are given out to far far more men than women every single year.
As much as we love the idea of honoring Supporting thespians, as the festival now intends to do, if history is any indication they'll still likely get stiffed with co-leads taking that "supporting" prize. What's more a "supporting" prize will do far less for a film in terms of getting it media attention. So everyone loses, really. Except the one actor, male or female or non-binary, who is thus honored that year.
We've droned on too long but we don't like this development. Equality between the sexes has always been a difficult concept for the world (and awards bodies) but at least in the traditional system, there was already equality of the sexes, at least numerically. Male and female actors won the exact same prizes in exactly equal amounts. This will no longer be the case in Berlin and anywhere else when this new sensitivity is deployed.