Representing 51% of our population through Hollywood entertainment is important to improving all our lives. Until we all take a stand for whose stories are told, women will continue to be second class citizens.
Lis' PULPIT TIME:
This year's Oscar campaign posters sums up the issue quite succinctly:
Demure. Waif. Powerless girl. Young Audrey Hepburn springs to mind. Definitely an object to be looked at. Graceful hand-job placement, ever so lightly cupping the balls.
Dominant. Powerful. In action. The subject. What springs to mind? Seriously, how can you miss the phallic placement and angle? The forceful aim? Oscars are about who is the biggest dick in Hollywood.
Oh my gods. Can you imagine the fits I've been having driving around town seeing these billboards the past month? AARGHHH!!!!!
FROM PUSH THE ENVELOPE'S SITE:
Oscar's Lost His Head This Year - It's Time to Take Action! The Academy Awards are a snapshot of America's creativity, but when it comes to women's visions, the picture has been cropped.
The Fund for Women Artists is launching a campaign to tell Hollywood that giving the male half of every story is not enough. Please join us in sending the movie industry a message that it's time to unleash the power of women's creativity and Push the Envelope, Please!
Women were ignored again this year in the key Oscar categories of Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original and Adapted Screenplays.
Best Picture: Four of the five films nominated for Best Picture focused almost entirely on the male characters.
Capote - 1 Guy
Good Night and Good Luck - 1 Guy
Brokeback Mountain - 2 Guys
Munich - 5 Guys
Crash - At least Crash has some central women characters, but men still have more screentime.
Best Director: No women were nominated in the Best Director category - continuing the neglect that has been an annual tradition for 75 of Oscar's 78 years. Of the 40 full-length films that received nominations in any category, Niki Caro's North Country is the only English language nominee directed by a woman and Cristina Comencini's Don't Tell (from Italy) is the only full-length foreign film directed by a woman.
Best Writers: In the three closely-watched categories of Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Diana Ossana, the co-writer of Brokeback Mountain, is the only female writer nominated.
This is Lis speaking again. Please visit their site to sign the open letter campaign, and find other ways to get involved in transforming our world. It only takes a few minutes of your time.
And if you want to argue any of these facts or make me wrong about this, please don't bother commenting here. I'm up to bigger things and don't have time for that BS. I'm standing in transforming our media world to accurately reflect our amazing communities. If you're about being negative and destructive and holding your neighbors down, your presence is gladly requested elsewhere on the net.
6 comments:
FYI -- I haven't given up on that article. I just have more things brewing.
You effin' rock, Joel. Cheers to you.
Forgive a bit of semantics -- is it "who is the biggest..." or "who has the biggest..."?
'Cause if it's the former, then I think it says something about how the Oscars reward a--holes who step on others to get on top.
If it's the latter, well... I guess that probably ties more to your thesis here.
MIM
MIM, I'm a total semantics ho. Chose the "is". :) Thanks for paying attentention.
Lynne, don't even get me started on housewives not being paid. Urgh. The more I hear of your story, the more I admire you and send you love and light. Thanks for sharing, and being your strong, bad-ass self.
Warren, Yes BUT they cropped out the heads so you wouldn't think of the actors' personas...any way you slice it, the ads were still chosen and cropped by modern people, deciding what to emphasize and what message to send. And the Julie Andrews shot...she normally has excellent posture. I'm sure they could have chosen one in which she didn't look like she wanted to disappear. All very odd considering the tasteful posters last year.
Hey, didja catch Clooney's speech? Dubya now has a least favorite filmmaker...
MIM
MIM, totally! That was my fav moment.
Warren, haven't been able to stop thinking about your point since I read it. Knowing what I know about the actors, I might have had a different reaction to the posters. Really hard to say. But the actors do bring their own iconic power to it when you know the groins belong to.
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