The Gothams have announced they will take away Best Actor and Best Actress and replace it with one gender-neutral prize for one lead actor and one gender-neutral prize for one supporting performance. There will be ten nominees and only one winner in lead and one winner in supporting.
The press release follows.
In general, having separate categories has helped women in the past, given that men dominate in front of and behind the camera. They get the better roles, they are behind the camera more often, they have less constraints put on them. Dividing the categories helped women do better – and if they wanted more women in the director race that is exactly what they ought to do – expand the categories.
In fact, this is WHY the BAFTA forced their director category to be comprised of 50% women. If you take that away men have and will continue to dominate. The Gothams are small enough that it likely won’t matter that much. They only have a small handful of people deciding. I think personally it makes for a more bland Oscar race, that’s for sure, especially considering Best Actress is probably the most favorite category discussed in the Oscar race. However, if broadened outward with a larger voting body that has to appeal to audiences, like the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards or the Oscars you might have a problem in terms of an outsized sampling of men. Some years women have the better and more plentiful roles but more often than not, men do.
Press release as follows:
New York, NY (August 5, 2021) – The Gotham Film & Media Institute announced today that, beginning this year, their Gotham Awards for acting will no longer be defined by gender. The Best Actor and Best Actress categories for independent feature films will be replaced with Outstanding Lead Performance and Outstanding Supporting Performance.
The move to introduce gender neutral lead and supporting acting awards builds on the legacy of the now 24-year-old Gotham Breakthrough Actor Award (to be renamed “Gotham Breakthrough Performer Award” as of this year) which has been gender neutral since its inception, and has previously been awarded to performers including Amy Adams, Elliot Page, Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of The Gotham Film & Media Institute, stated: “The Gotham Awards have a thirty year history of celebrating diverse voices in independent storytelling. We are proud to recognize outstanding acting achievements each year, and look forward to a new model of honoring performances without binary divisions of gender. We are grateful to those who helped to start this conversation in recent years and we are thrilled that the Gotham Awards will continue to support artistic excellence in a more inclusive and equitable way.”
Additional category updates for 2021 include the creation of a Breakthrough Nonfiction Series award (previously included with fiction series) and the eligibility of international documentaries in the Best Documentary Feature category. The Gotham Awards will also be adding the first acting category within its Breakthrough Series categories with Outstanding Performance in a New Series. There will be up to ten nominees in each of the three new categories including Outstanding Lead Performance, Outstanding Supporting Performance and Outstanding Performance in a New Series.
In addition to these new or updated awards, the remaining categories include Best Feature, Best International Feature, Best Screenplay and the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award for feature films; the series awards include Breakthrough Series (under 40 minutes) and Breakthrough Series (over 40 minutes). There will be five nominees in each of the legacy categories.
As the first major awards ceremony of the fall season, the Gotham Awards provide critical early recognition and media attention to worthy independent films and series and their writers, directors, producers, and actors with twelve competitive awards categories. The awards are also unique for their ability to assist in catapulting award recipients prominently into national awards season attention.
The Gotham Awards named Nomadland as Best Feature in 2020, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Previous acting winners include Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Adam Driver (Marriage Story), Awkwafina (The Farewell), and Nicole Beharie (Miss Juneteenth), with Ahmed and Driver both receiving Oscar nominations. In 2019, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story won the Gotham Award for Best Feature on its way to a Best Picture nomination later that season.
In addition to the competitive categories, the Gotham Awards also recognize significant achievement through career Tributes. The 2021 Tributes will be announced in the coming weeks.
Submissions for the 2021 Gotham Awards will open on Friday, August 6. Detailed eligibility, criteria, and submission information is available at https://awards.thegotham.org/.
The deadline for submissions for the 2021 Gotham Awards is Wednesday, September 15, 2021.
Nominations will be announced on Thursday, October 21, 2021, and the Gotham Awards Ceremony will take place on Monday, November 29, 2021 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.
About The Gotham Film & Media Institute
The Gotham champions the future of storytelling by connecting artists with essential resources at all stages of development and distribution. The organization, under the leadership of Executive Director and award-winning producer Jeffrey Sharp, fosters a vibrant and sustainable independent storytelling community through its year-round programs, which include Gotham Week, Gotham Labs, Filmmaker Magazine, the Gotham Awards, and Gotham EDU.About The Gotham Awards
The Gotham Awards, one of the leading honors for independent film and television, provides early acknowledgement to groundbreaking independent films and television series. Selected by distinguished juries and presented in New York City, the home of independent film, the Gotham Awards are the first honors of the film awards season. This public showcase honors the filmmaking community, expands the audience for independent films, and supports the work that The Gotham Film & Media Institute does behind the scenes throughout the year to bring such films to fruition.
So I had a thought… This sort of thing wouldn’t happen but if you really do want to do this to be inclusive of non binary people here is how I would do it.
One “semi-genderless” category for lead (and a separate one for supporting) with 10 nominees, a maximum of 5 of the nominees can be men, a maximum of 5 can be women and, for the sake of argument, a maximum of 5 can be non binary. People’s choice of gender is obviously respected no matter how they choose to identify. People vote from the category of 10 with ranked voting and the top 2 that are not the same gender are awarded. Nobody knows who was 1 and who was 2 apart from the accountants so they are awarded in a random order.
This is the only way I can see that you could go to one category without creating more problems than you fix… And even then it is only kind of one category.
I guess not enough actors and actresses to fill two/four categories.
I dislike this decision a lot. I feel that, like the cancellation of the Globes, this has a different effect than iit intends.
Bad idea that limits the number of winners and nominees.
I don’t absolutely think that the major televised awards will follow this.
if the Oscars did gender/neutral acting categories in the old days then no male actor would have won any Oscars for about 35 years between 1935 and 1970, lol
Not true—-Brando would have won for Waterfront in a walk to give just one example. I’m just having fun. No offense. I thought of him of course because he won the same year as Grace Kelly. I’m a bit of a pedant. lol
Makes sense in theory; a mess in practice. They’re going to wind up having to make rules to ensure that half the nominees are women, then they’re going to wind up trying to find a way to tweak the voting rules to ensure that women win half the time.
I keep personal listings of awards and nominations for each year from which I’ve seen a certain amount of movies and a few months ago I changed my acting category lists to be non-gendered for a few reasons:
1) The obvious reason was that a “male-female” divide would either make non-binary actors ineligible or would force them into categories that do not reflect those actors’ genders, and either of those options would be truly offensive.
2) While of course I think that it’s good that having the “male-female” divide emphasizes the work of at the very least 10 actresses on a consistent basis in a way that helps them get roles in the future, I think it might be helpful to consider the question from another point of view: would you want a separate female director category? I feel the Oscar community is much more accepting of the notion of gendered acting categories because they’ve existed for so long but if the question is changed from “should we remove gendered acting categories” to “should the acting categories be gendered or not”, it’s fully the same discussion people are having about making gendered directing categories. I completely get the idea of more exposure and don’t feel that strongly about this as the central argument for making the decision in one way or the other (my first point is in my opinion the strongest argument for non-gendered acting categories) but at the same time personally it can often feel like awards groups on some level reporting results of gender equality because the same amount of male and female performances got nominated without the voters actually having to challenge their tastes and opinions in any way. This can be seen in the way the Academy often seems to be able to just pull five best actor nominees effortlessly from best picture contenders whereas despite best actress at least in my opinion being the most robust acting category of most years in film, it feels like they have trouble finding five nominees in best actress. Yes, the removal of gendered acting categories would result in very male-heavy acting lineups in the first few years, that would start a genuinely necessary conversation about gender inequality in the observation of these performances, which would hopefully to lead to actual change that would make Academy members question their own points of view as filmgoers. It would also probably more precisely reflect the gender inequality issues that are still clearly present in today’s Hollywood and could be used to actually talk about these issues.
3) I’ve always felt that the amount of categories focused on one part of the film being half the amount of craft categories at the Oscars is absurd.
I always liked this idea in theory. Separate lead male / lead female actor categories only made sense back in the day when near every film had The Male Lead and The Female Lead.
In practice, I’m not sure how it will play out. It might hurt inclusion, or it might end up as something overly virtue-signally. But we’ll see.
I find it so funny how political correctness is continously damaging women’s inclusion in everything. Women are the sacrifical lamb for LGBTs, as they are too a minority and do not have privileges, but are treated as such. And nobody dares to say anything.
Sacrificial lamb? Please explain.
lol please don’t encourage him to
I think animated characters should be allowed in too, like King Shark.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7feb8c4372ba6c370127f7f4fb282bc1e6f6f993a5b4428df902d94f08d4923d.gif
Nah, they need their own category, which can split into Lead and Supporting if there are enough performances from enough films. (I’d say 22 performances submitted and deemed eligible from at least 11 distinct productions.) Also, honor those animators (up to 5) who were most directly responsible for the design and animation of the character, alongside the voice actor/singing voice actor/motion capture actor model.
The last lines at the end 0f Bridge 0n the River Kwai are sp0ken by James D0nald – Madness ! Madness ! . . Madness !
I can see it, sort of, BUT it will cause more trouble than it will help.
They lost their minds