In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Awards

Oh No It’s Award Season Again Thread

Share your thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs here, for whatever production and whoever’s performance, and feel free to go to town with subtext and meta-commentary. Just please be spoiler-aware for those readers who haven’t managed to catch up with various books/movies/TV yet.

I’ll get you started. Consider going to see The Dressmaker.

The Oscars: A Twitter-Eye View

I didn’t watch the Oscars because nobody was paying me to, but I did follow my friends watching them on Twitter, and here is what I gather:

1) Patricia Arquette made the stupidest white mainstream feminist plea for equal pay ever, claiming that “gays” and people of color need now to step up and fight for equal pay for women. Things she failed to mention: lots of gay people and people of color are women. Pretty much half of them, I’d say. More things she failed to mention: the pay gap between white men and white women is bad, but nowhere near as bad as that between white men and black women, or white men and Native American women, or white men and…you get the picture. Also, the implication that gay people and people of color owe [white] women something because “we’ve” been “fighting for them” and they’ve had enough time in the spotlight? Straight out untrue and obnoxious. Arquette, no doubt your intentions are good, but try to think next time.

2) The same crowd that apparently went wild over Arquette’s speech was silent and uncomfortable when Common and John Legend spoke about the mass incarceration of black men in the US. Fantastic.

3) Lest you think that Hollywood even gives two shits about white women–even famous white women in their clubhouse–they once again invited wife-beater and rapist extraordinaire Sean Penn to the stage, this time to give the Oscar for Best Picture. When the winner turned out to be Birdman, he reminded everyone how revolting he was by making a racist joke about the film’s director, Alejandro González Iñárritu. Apparently Iñárritu handled the situation with grace and dignity, calling on Mexicans in the US to fight for the respect that is their due, and Penn’s defenders immediately took to the internets to say it was totes OK because Penn was only joking, and anyway, Penn and Iñárritu are friends. Which is weird, because maybe I have this “friendship” thing completely backwards, but I always thought that part of being someone’s friend is not making racist jokes about them.

I’ve seen a lot of tweets about how Hollywood’s liberalism is a façade, and I’m going to say something controversial here: no, it’s not. This is liberalism. Liberalism is very good at handling the rights of the individual; liberalism posits that the structures of power as we know them are fine, it’s just that everybody should have access; liberalism wants us to all be friends. It’s not terribly good at power dynamics based on group membership and intersecting identity categories and axes of oppression and exploitation; it’s deeply uncomfortable with calls to dismantle institutions and power structures as they stand; it has a really hard time admitting that sometimes you have to take sides and fight. And that’s why the Hollywood audience went wild for Arquette, didn’t want to deal with what Legend and Common were saying, and keeps pretending Sean Penn is a fine human being. And it’s why traditional liberalism on its own, without the threat of the radical left lurking in the wings, is terribly weak sauce. Let me quote Barbara Ehrenreich, from one of my favorite of her essays:

“I can’t wait for the liberals to make a comeback, and not because I am one of them. When the liberals went underground, it was left to the rejects of the Democratic party–the feminists, peace activists, rainbow coalitionists, socialists, union militants–to hold up the liberal banner. We were left to defend social programs, like welfare and Medicaid, that were never halfway adequate in the first place, and to argue–a little wearily–for the mild reforms that might make life marginally more secure for the average person. What else was there to do in such a desolate political landscape, with no one…occupying the long expanse between us, on the left, and the likes of Jimmy Swaggart on the far, far right? But if the Democrats find the courage to get back to their business–working for the slow and piecemeal reform of our far-from-perfect society–maybe we’ll be able to get back to ours. And that is, as it has always been, to insist that slow and piecemeal reform is just not good enough.” (The Worst Years of Our Lives. HarperCollinsPublishers: New York, 1990. 81.)

What did I miss by watching the Oscars only via Twitter? Let me know in the comments section.

“Strength” of Character: How the Silver Screen Perpetuates Gender Stereotypes

What do we mean when we define a female character as “strong”? When an actress is the protagonist, her conflict is decidedly different than the average male protagonist’s: In literary terms, we often see the female protagonist engaged in a “man vs. self” struggle, while male protagonists wrestle with outside forces. The point is not at all that any one iteration of female “strength” is more admirable – more worthy of depiction on-screen – than another, but rather than our female characters consistently demonstrate one kind of strength while our male characters demonstrate another. Furthermore, when our female characters demonstrate stereotypically “male” strength, they do not win the awards.

These complications of storytelling are all exacerbated by Hollywood demographics :

Open Oscars Thread

Have at it.

**UPDATE: Way to drill down way lower than people’s worst expectations of you, Seth McFarlane. Bleagh.**

**UPDATE: WTF? appalling Onion tweet re Quvenzhané Wallis.**

A night at the Oscars (“Phew. There. I solved racism!”)

Managed to miss this year’s Oscar nominees, and now you’re biting your nails because the big night is coming and you aren’t prepared?! Me, either. But the good people at Jest have us covered in adorable fashion, with Kids Reenact the Oscar Nominees. For instance, if you missed The Help, little kids can show you what you missed.

Oscars Open Thread

So the Oscars were last night, and a woman won Best Director for the first time ever! And that same woman’s movie won Best Picture! Which is exciting, especially since the next big contender was Avatar, which I have not seen mostly because I hate James Cameron and I really hate colonialist masturbatory pet-projects. Lauren wrote about The Hurt Locker here, and Sady covered Avatar pretty well over at her regular pad. Yay Kathryn Bigelow, boo James Cameron.

The big Oscar disappointment for me was Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress. Even though I love Sandra Bullock — she seems very sweet and smart and funny and like she’d be really fun to have a few beers with, because she would definitely be the person encouraging you to eat barbeque at 3 in the morning, and who doesn’t love that person? And her dress was one of my favorites last night, and whoever styled her did a fantastic job. But the movie she won for? And the character she played? It’s White Lady Saves The Day to the max, and I’m just awfully tired of movies about how tough white women come in and save children of color. Or, as David Edelstein put it, “[Bullock won] because her role in The Blind Side spoke to two semi-contradictory impulses in Academy voters: a) guilt over being filthy rich and white; and b) a hunger to channel your altruism in ways that enable you to crush other people on the playing field.”

But really, the Oscars were full of un-surprises, so onto the important things: What everyone was wearing. My absolute favorite was Sandy Powell, the woman who won the Oscar for Best Costume Design. But I can’t find a picture of her, so my #2 was Cameron Diaz (pictured above; Maggie Gyllenhaal was a close second). She was my surprise favorite of the night, especially because she often shows up to awards shows looking… troubling. And she generally just doesn’t do it for me. But she rocked the gold dress and I loved it.

On the dude side, of course Tom Ford was the best dressed:

Read More…Read More…

Gender-Neutral Oscars?

Kim Elsesser from the Center for Study of Women at the UCLA poses this question in the New York Times: Why is it considered acceptable to segregate nominations by sex, offering different Oscars for best actor and best actress?

The editorial is well worth a read. I agree with her in principle, but what of the fact that women are 51% of the population but only made up 29.9% of speaking roles in the 100 top-grossing movies of 2007? And that 83% of the directors, writers and producers of those movies were men? With so many more men snagging speaking roles — and so many more men writing, directing and producing films — women just wouldn’t have an equal shot at a gender-neutral acting award. But perhaps that’s not reason enough to keep awards gender-segregated. Thoughts?

Alternative Business School Rankings

This is awesome: The Aspen Institute has released a survey of MBA programs, going beyond test scores and ranking them according to “how well schools are preparing their students for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business.” [Full disclosure: A friend of mine worked on the report].

The rankings reward programs which are not only academically rigorous, but which impart upon their students values, ethics and a sense of social responsibility. Some of the findings:

• The percentage of schools surveyed that require students to take a course dedicated to business and society issues has increased dramatically over time, but at a slowing rate: 34% in 2001; 45% in 2003; 54% in 2005; 63% in 2007; 69% in 2009.
• Since 2007, the number of elective courses offered per school that contain some degree of social, environmental or ethical content has increased by 12%, from approximately 16.6 to 18.6 electives.
• The proportion of schools offering general social, environmental or ethical content in required core courses has increased in many business disciplines–Accounting, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Operations Management–since the last survey in 2007.
• However, the percentage of schools requiring content in a core course on how mainstream business can act as an engine for social or environmental change remains low, at 30%.
• Approximately 7% of faculty at the surveyed business schools published scholarly articles in peer-reviewed, business journals that address social, environmental or ethical issues. The titles and abstracts of the 1,211 articles are available at www.BeyondGreyPinstripes.org.

It’s a pretty cool report, and definitely worth checking out.