Emma Watson is right: film awards should be ‘gender neutral’

Emma Watson isn’t, you might say, to everyone’s taste, given that her feminism – she can hardly get up in the morning, it seems, given the burden of expectations on her as a woman – is combined with the possession of a very large, Harry Potter-related fortune. My own reservations about her have more to do with her limited range as an actress – the Dorothy Parker gag about running the whole gamut from A to B comes to mind, though W for wooden might be more like it.

But she had a point, she really did, in her acceptance speech for MTV’s acting award for her role as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. She has been mocked rather cruelly – though why she should pay any attention to anything people say on Twitter is beyond me – for making too much of the award, given the award does appear to be a bucket of popcorn.