Oscars 2018 A night that will change Hollywood forever?
The fall-out, the fashion – and the girl who stole the show
She brought the house down with her Best Actress acceptance speech at Sunday night’s Academy Awards, asking every female nominee in the Dolby Theatre to stand with her in solidarity. Then Frances Mcdormand took the conversation in an unexpected direction: away from Me Too, Time’s Up and the allegations of abuse that have rocked the industry and dominated the news since October last year – and right back to brass tacks.
“We all have stories to tell and projects we need financed,” said the star of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, matter-of-factly, before warning any interested parties not “to talk to us about it at the parties tonight” but to “invite us into their offices in a couple of days’ time”.
It was the most rabble-rousing speech of a damp squib of a ceremony, a gem that was all the more powerful for coming from an actor of Mcdormand’s ability. But in telling the world that out there in Hollywood it was back to business – specifically the business of pushing for gender parity in the movie industry – Mcdormand highlighted how hard doing that would be. Should women really wait to be “invited” to men’s offices? She briskly corrected herself with “or you can come to ours”, before once again inadvertently deferring to the patriarchy: “Whatever suits you best.”
It wasn’t a gaffe; it couldn’t even really be called a faux pas. Every woman watching at home recognised the actress’s self-corrections as the kind of internal wrangles that can all too easily play out in our heads when we interact with men in a professional context, whatever the industry. But surely the decades of doing what suits men best are over? If the past few months have told us anything, it’s that the film industry is more stymied by misogyny than most. And that alongside the casting-couch-style abuse that has been covered up for years, there are more mundane concerns that need to be addressed industry-wide: the pay gap, the fair representation of women on screen both in terms of characters and spoken lines and, of course, the fact – recently highlighted in an open letter to commissioners by more than 70 female TV writers in Britain – that, for some baffling reason, female writers in the industry in general “remain an untapped resource”.
“Those brass-tacks conversations Frances so cleverly used her Oscar platform to remind us about started well before Me Too and Time’s Up,” explains Dr Helen Jacey, author of The Woman In The Story: Writing Memorable Female Characters. “You’ve got all the work of Women in Hollywood, and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media [slogan: “If she can see it, she can be it”] going on. But every culture has