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| Tilda Swinton at the Venice film festival for the premiere of The Human Voice |
Tilda Swinton: championing talent, regardless of gender
The star was the first to welcome the abolition of male and female awards at the Berlin film festival
Saturday 15 September 2020
I
t is rare that a move being described as “eminently sensible” is newsworthy; still, at the Venice film festival last week, this is how Tilda Swinton referred to the fact that the Berlin film festival will no longer be handing out acting awards by gender.
“I think it’s pretty much inevitable that everybody will follow. It’s just obvious to me,” she said. Cate Blanchett also expressed her support, explaining that she prefers to be known as an actor. “I am of the generation where the word actress was used almost always in a pejorative sense. So I claim the other space,” she said.
Take it from me, little occasions as much commenter wrath as following this publication’s style guide and referring to a woman who acts as an “actor”. The notion of rewarding good performance by performance alone already exists for some award shows and, as Swinton says, it is inevitable that more will follow.
Splitting acting categories into two genders, and only acting categories, is something that makes less sense the more you think about it, like saying a word over and over again, until it no longer sounds like a word. Extend it to any other category – best costume (male), best sound design (female) etc – and it is anachronistic and strange. And as the non-binary actor Asia Kate Dillon, star of Billions, asked the Emmys in 2017: “If the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are meant to denote assigned sex I ask, respectfully, why is that necessary?”
Some say that without splitting awards by gender, women would be underrepresented, as they are in, say, best director, a category that is usually all-male, regardless of who is making films that year. But that argument is unconvincing, half-hearted, and it no longer feels good enough.
I love awards ceremonies so much that I feel real fury when a deserving winner is robbed, yet it seems to me that the only downside would be cutting the number of acting awards, and therefore acceptance speeches, in half. While I am here for equality, I am not here for being deprived of the opportunity to decide whether tears are real or to spot those “accidental” omissions from the thank-yous.
On the other hand, nobody who wasn’t stuck right there in the room has ever watched the entirety of the Grammys. Abolish gendered categories and we can zip through everything in an hour, argue about the winners for a bit, then go home and have an early night. An eminently sensible suggestion.
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