If you tune in to the Oscars during the early hours of Monday morning, you’ll note – along with sickly fawning about contemporary motion pictures being high art, beautiful people in beautiful clothes, and the kind of feigned surprise that wouldn’t look out of place in a school production – two glaring anomalies in the line-up: ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognised a leading actress every year since 1929. It’s one of the oldest prizes for women in the arts. Back in the Twenties, when there was even less of a chance a studio would let a woman write or direct a film, winning Best Actress was the pinnacle of female achievement. But if the Academy wants to be taken seriously as an arbiter of artistic merit, it needs to take an axe to these two gilded figurines.
Together with their male equivalents, the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories are the only gendered awards in the ceremony.
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