Imagine, for a moment, that you are standing on a podium at the Oscars, clutching your golden statuette, as millions of non-famous civilians wait for you to open your mouth and speak. The accolade of best supporting actress is the biggest moment of a career unfettered with annual award nominations (you’re no Meryl, in other words). Granted the sudden, worldwide limelight, how do you react? Do you bask in the glory of industry recognition, sobbing like a Paltrow as you thank everyone from your overworked Hispanic maid to your personal vaginal steamer? Or do you seize the moment to publicly address a long-term injustice?
Patricia Arquette courageously chose injustice, in a powerful acceptance speech that was the moment of the Oscars night – not only because of her passionate but rightly tipsy and cross-sounding words in support of equal pay, but because of the uproarious response of the audience. “To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” she said. “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” As the cheer rose, we saw Meryl Streep emphatically finger-pointing as if at a rally, Jennifer Lopez hollering in support, and the ecstatic, grinning face of a sequin-clad Shirley MacLaine.
The hijacking of the shallow, rigid-faced performance that is the Oscars by an authentic and righteous political point does much to lift the heart, especially at what was potentially the most feminist of Oscars ceremonies yet (this is not saying much, as anyone who witnessed Scarlett Johansson’s face as John Travolta pawed her from behind will know; but one must count one’s blessings). If you needed proof greater than Beyoncé that the fight for gender equality is now a mainstream concern, then this is it.
In Hollywood, momentum has been building as actresses become increasingly narked at sexist attitudes both on and off the red carpet, not least the expectation that a woman should eschew all solids in the weeks prior to award ceremonies in what Tina Fey dubbed “the Hunger Games”. At this year’s Baftas Julianne Moore opened her speech with the words “I am hungry”; Naomi Watts said on Sunday that it was usual to starve yourself. And it didn’t stop at the public acknowledgement of Hollywood’s sexist and fascist body ideals.
This year the odious “manicam”, a vile E! Entertainment gimmick that involved asking female celebrities to “walk” their fingers down a miniature red carpet in order to show off their jewels and nail varnish – failed to appear. Instead, Arquette and Reese Witherspoon lent their voices to the #AskHerMore campaign, a movement which took the revolutionary step of asking journalists to view actresses as more than just their dresses (a precedent set by Jennifer Lawrence in 2013 who, when asked about her Oscars dress, responded that “this is the top, and this is the bottom”). Instead of “who” she was wearing, Arquette spoke about her work on sanitation projects in developing countries.
You might ask what this Hollywood feminism means for ordinary women. To borrow and then discard a phrase frequently used in social justice conversations on the internet, there is no greater “platform privilege” than an Oscar podium, and hearing a (later) request from Arquette, a rich white woman, that “it’s time for all the women in America and all the men who love women and all the gay people and all the people of colour that we’ve fought for, to fight for us now” has put some noses out of joint. Writer Roxane Gay particularly objected to “the notion that queers and people of colour have had their time in the struggle spotlight long enough”. After all, none of these battles are by any means over, and Arquette has ended up sounding perhaps more divisive than she intended with her call for solidarity.
What redeems her is that she was talking about pay equality for all women, not just rich film stars – though she would be perfectly within her rights to take Hollywood to task. Feminism is for everyone, even the beautiful and famous, and her speech emerged from a context in which the Sony hacks had revealed that Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were paid less than their male co-stars for their performances in American Hustle. Aaron Sorkin, meanwhile, wrote in an email that female leading film roles are “nothing close to the degree of difficulty” of male roles.
Last year, when Cate Blanchett accepted her Oscar for Blue Jasmine, she criticised male executives “who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the centre are niche experiences”. But the fact that all the films shortlisted for best picture were stories about men – even men who had faced great torment and adversity – shows that there is still a long way to go. You only need look at the website Casting Call Woe to see the sexism actresses still face today at the hands of these director “bros”.
Equality of representation in film is important because visual culture is a prism through which we see the world. Russell Crowe demonstrated the industry’s enduring problem with ageism when he said that “the woman who is saying [roles have dried up] is the woman who at 40, 45, 48 still wants to play the ingenue.”
I’m not one for playing oppression Olympics, but I’d ask detractors of Arquette’s speech that they acknowledge this inequality. Older women both inside and outside Hollywood suffer prejudice in terms of their societal invisibility, in the struggle for employment, and because they have lived through times that were disadvantageous to women in ways that your average 17-year-old Tumblr activist cannot imagine.
Sexism, racism and ageism in Hollywood deserve as much scrutiny as ever. The fight for equal pay for all women may be an old, unglamorous fight, but it is also the enduring absurdity of our age. Anyone – whether gay, trans or a person of colour – will benefit from a society that judges itself on how it treats those it has historically oppressed, and equal pay for all women – rich or poor – is part of that desperate need for progress. Oscars aside, it’s high time this generation of activists listened to their elders.
