All entries for Thursday 15 January 2015

All Oscar nominees for Best Actress award are women

For the first time in history, all the nominees for Best Actress at the Oscar’s are women.

The surprise turnaround follows sustained pressure from feminist activist groups, who called the decision to give the coveted Best Actress award to male nominees at the last 85 Oscars “shambolic”.

“In this day and age, it should really be women who are nominated for the Best Actress award”, said one such feminist activist. “They didn’t burn their bras for nothing, you know.”

The Academy, long known to be one of the most undemocratic voting systems in the world (only behind FIFA and the country in Kafka’s ‘The Trial’), bowed to such innovative slogans as “Women should win Best Actress” and “Down with this sort of thing”.

For the first time, voting for the Best Actress category was not carried out by a lone angry upper class white man from the US. Instead, this year, there were two angry upper class white men from the US.

Barry Steinfield, who came up with the idea to expand the voting panel in this way, explained his decision thusly: “What we realised was that you can’t have just one person from a very specific background be the sole decision maker on something like that.”

“By opening up the panel in the way that we did, we’ve really managed to diversify the whole thing. But don’t just take my word for it: the proof is in the pudding! I honestly don’t think we would achieve what we have done this year were it not for our restructuring of the panel in this way,” Steinfield continued.

“It ultimately all dawned on us, while we were sipping champagne one breakfast, that it’s really important that women are nominated for the Best Actress award,” he added. “Otherwise it might send out the wrong message.”

There was plenty of backslapping among the feminist activists after the Oscar nominations were announced, but the news has also been greeted warmly by normal women, too.

Marie Femme, a woman, told this reporter: “It’s just great that only women have been nominated for the Best Actress award this year.”

“It will make a change from seeing the award go to Tom Hanks every year,” Femme added.

Samuel Dodson : 15 Jan 2015 16:07 |  Tags: Journalism News Oscars Reportage |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem