Talent, not gender, ‘the key to awards’

Cate Blanchett in her Oscar-winning role in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine.

Cate Blanchett is a hugely accomplished practitioner of the dramatic arts, on stage and screen, and deservedly has been highly decorated for her achievements.

At the Academy Awards: Best actress for the title role in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

At the Golden Globes: Best actress in a motion picture — drama, for her turn in Elizabeth.

At Australia’s AACTAs: best lead actress in Little Fish, Rowan Woods’s gritty film set in Sydney’s western suburbs, among other awards.

But at the Venice Film Festival, which got under way this week, Blanchett effectively swept those trophies off the shelf and into the garbage bin.

Declaring “actress” to be little more than an insult — a relic of an earlier, sexist Hollywood — she wants to be judged fairly and squarely on her acting, not her gender.

With her high profile, and with the world’s eyes on Venice, she’s joined the push from parts of the film industry to do away with gender-specific awards altogether.

“I have always referred to myself as an actor,” she said. “I am of the generation where the word actress was used almost always in a pejorative sense. So I claim the other space.”

Blanchett is the president of the competition jury at Venice that awards the festival’s highest honour, the Golden Lion.

Her comments follow the decision last month by the Berlin International Film Festival to amend its awards for acting. The Silver Bear will now be given for best leading performance, and best supporting performance, rather than to the best actress or best supporting actor.

Berlin’s will be the first major awards to go gender-neutral, but others already have made the move. The MTV Movie and TV Awards in 2017 gave its first (non-gender-specific) best actor award to Emma Watson, for Beauty and the Beast.

Organisers of other awards no doubt will be exercised by this latest wave of reform.

The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts so far is non-committal on the subject, saying only it will watch with interest the next edition of the Berlin festival.

Awards given on merit rather than on gender are a welcome and overdue development.

The Academy Awards, confronted with the overwhelming whiteness of nominees in acting categories, and with the overwhelming maleness of nominees for key filmmaking awards, has moved in recent years to broaden its base of voting members to include more women and people of colour.

As Blanchett put it in Venice: “I think a good performance is a good performance no matter the sexual orientation of who is making them … The hardest thing as a jury member is to sit in judgment of other people’s work. That’s the hardest thing, not the (gender) demarcation.”