Too soon for gender neutral awards

the first gender-neutral award for acting.

She was feted for her role as Belle in Disney’s live action remake of Beauty and the Beast.

As Watson said in her acceptance speech, ‘‘the first acting award in history that doesn’t separate nominees based on their sex says something about how we perceive the human experience’’.

On the face of it, the move away from separate categories for male and female actors seems logical. Male and female actors do exactly the same work under the same conditions so why should they not be eligible for the same honours?

In that sense, it is a much easier argument than, for example, the debate over pay parity in sports like tennis, where men and women play on separate tours.

On screen at least, actors do not compete against each other as athletes do (with an honourable exception for the backstabbing of All About Eve). Surely that makes the case for recognising their achievements as equal rather than picking a best male actor and best female actor.

Not so fast says Geena Davis, star of movies Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own. Those two early-90s hits were thought to be the harbingers of a time when Hollywood producers would recognise that stories about and featuring women would prove just as popular as male-centric movies.

Except it didn’t happen. Analysing the top 200 live-action films of 2014 and 2015, the institute’s research found that men were on screen twice as much as women and spoke twice as much as women.

That research led Davis to pour cold water on the idea of genderneutral awards, saying men would dominate them as gender balance was ‘‘profoundly skewed’’ in movies and until there were as many ‘‘incredible, well-written, fantastic roles for women’’ as there were for men, then women’s performances would inevitably be overshadowed.

Until that day, it can be argued that the publicity that accompanies a best actress or best supporting actress nomination is an effective way of highlighting the work of women.

Look at Hidden Figures, which despite focusing on characters who have been triply underrepresented in film (female African-american mathematicians), became 20th Century Fox’s second-biggest US grossing movie of 2016.

Surely female actors would prefer to level that playing field before fighting to be eligible for the same awards as men.