Congratulations to Cillian Murphy for his nomination at Bifa, the British Independent Film Awards. Up for his turn as a teacher in Tim Mielants’s Steve, he competes against nine other male actors and just two female actors. Hang on. That doesn’t sound right.
Bifa is among an increasing number of awards organisations, Berlin International Film Festival and Independent Spirit Awards among them, that have done away with gender distinction in acting prizes.
Murphy joins the likes of Frank Dillane, Harry Melling and (the sole woman) Jennifer Lawrence among the six nominees for best lead performance. Maxine Peake, mentioned for I Swear, is the only woman up for best supporting performance.
The gender divide gets a bit less embarrassing if you include the Bifa nominations for “joint lead”, but it then gets worse again if you look to the seven (seven!) male stars of Warfare, winners of the already-announced best-ensemble prize.
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The organisers will, justifiably, note that, over the four years they’ve had gender-neutral awards, this is the first time female nominees haven’t been the majority. But there is no way of turning this into a good look. This is the sort of result sceptics feared when various bodies proposed making such changes. As recently as 2022, a US study found that men still took two-thirds of speaking roles in top-grossing films. What did you think was going to happen?
Yet, on paper, the shift makes some sense. It certainly tidies up difficulties around the increasing number of actors who identify as nonbinary. Earlier this year Karla Sofía Gascón became the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for the best-actress Oscar, but there remains no comfortable option for those who see themselves as fitting neither current category. Recently, Liv Hewson, the nonbinary star of Yellowjackets, withdrew from Emmy consideration as “there’s not a place for me in the acting categories”.
One might reasonably point out that no other film profession competes for awards in gender-specific categories. Only three women have been nominated for best cinematography at the Oscars. Such technical categories would, perhaps, profit more from a gender division.
There is, moreover, something quaintly archaic about the Oscars and others still referring to “actors” and “actresses”. The Irish Times stylebook long ago forbade the distinction except when referring to awards, so allowing sentences such as “Amanda Seyfried is among the actors competing for best actress at the upcoming Oscars”.
Otherwise it would be as if we still referred to sculptresses, poetesses and authoresses. One imagines such people sitting about Bloomsbury in worried anticipation of Virginia Woolf’s next palpitation.
Is a shift to nongendered Oscars now inevitable? Not necessarily. The realities of the business have generated support for the status quo in unlikely places. Bella Ramsey, the popular nonbinary star of The Last of Us, is uneasy about abolishing the current distinctions. “I think it’s so important that that’s preserved – that the recognition for women in this industry is preserved,” they said on Louis Theroux’s podcast. “Where do nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people fit into that? I don’t know.”
Few critics’ organisations – generally more progressive than the Academy Awards – have made the shift. Last December, Adrien Brody won best actor and Marianne Jean-Baptiste took best actress from New York Film Critics Circle. My colleague Tara Brady, president of Dublin Film Critics Circle, doesn’t see that body altering format any time soon. “It is the only realistic way of redressing historic imbalances,” she says.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is hedging its bets. “It’s in the early exploration stage and one of many conversations about the future of awards and the Oscars,” a cagey Bill Kramer, the academy’s chief executive, told Variety last year.
Embarrassments such as this week’s Bifa nominations will do little to accelerate those explorations. The last thing the academy wants, as the Oscar centenary looms in 2028, is to see female actors reduced to a minuscule rump among a mass of thespian testosterone.
Imagine if there were a repeat of the jaw-dropper at the Brit Awards two years ago. In 2022 the music gongs abolished gender categories in the artist-of-the-year prize. In 2023 they nominated five men and not a single woman. It is just a decade since the academy generated fury as – precipitating the #OscarSoWhite campaign – not a single actor of colour made it into the final corral. At least no such gender shut-out is currently possible.
The present system is illogical, eccentric and outdated, but, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, it remains the worst arrangement apart from all the others. Not least because it maintains historical continuity. If Jessie Buckley wins best actress for Hamnet next March (and she probably will) she will take the award once grasped by Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman and Diane Keaton. Don’t take that away from her.
