Here's a weird thing to contemplate.
You know how so many people hate the idea of ~*quotas*~? When it's award season and people start tabulating the nominations demographically, somebody pops up and goes, "What, you want there to be quotas?"
You know how so many people hate the idea of ~*quotas*~? When it's award season and people start tabulating the nominations demographically, somebody pops up and goes, "What, you want there to be quotas?"
And they'll explain - without anyone actually proposing it - that having a certain amount of awards set aside for, say, Black actors or Asian actors would be unfair and insulting because they're fundamentally doing the same job as white actors and so everybody should compete.
So here's where it gets weird: every major acting award I can think of off the top of my head has separate categories for men and women. Which, the way our society recognizes talent, is tantamount to setting aside X many awards per year for women.
And as near as I can figure, the reason this came about historically is that "actoring" and "actressing" were effectively seen as different enough jobs? In the same way that what makes for a good lead performance isn't the same as what makes for a good supporting performance.
Am I calling for more demographic divisions of categories? No. Am I calling for the male/female categories to be merged? No. I mean, ideally, but not without other, more significant societal changes first.
I'm just saying: this is *weird* and it flies under the radar as normal.
I'm just saying: this is *weird* and it flies under the radar as normal.
I guess athletic contests normalized the idea of separate heats for men and women to compete in long before the modern acting awards, too... which doesn't really explain acting being a dual track but might help explain why it doesn't jump out as "unfair" to quota-haters.
