From the New York Times news section:
A Music Award Went Gender Neutral. It Ended Up With All-Male Nominees.
In 2022, the Brit Awards merged its top artist prizes to include male, female and nonbinary acts. This year, the event faced backlash for not nominating any women.
By Alex Marshall
Alex Marshall reported from London.Feb. 11, 2023
On Saturday night at a glittering ceremony in London, the pop star Harry Styles was named artist of the year at the Brit Awards, the highest honor at Britain’s equivalent of the Grammys.
…But to some watching the televised ceremony in Britain, the acclaim for the pop icon was a little soured because Styles triumphed in a category that did not have a single female nominee—an unintended consequence of the decision a little more than a year earlier by the Brit Awards to merge its categories for best male and best female artist of the year into one gender-neutral top prize.
…At a time when other major cultural award shows—including the Tony Awards and the Academy Awards— are facing pressure to include nonbinary artists, the experience at the Brits shows the difficulties that can arise from removing gendered categories.
…But three years ago, the organization faced a dilemma after the singer Sam Smith announced they were nonbinary and used they/them pronouns.
Sam Smith, everybody!
I used to feel sorry for Sam Smith because Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne sued him for stealing three notes from their song “I Won’t Back Down,” which is the kind of petty thing Petty, who loved the business of show biz, would do to amuse himself in his dotage. But now I encourage elderly songwriters to sue Smith for stealing three or two notes, heck, sue him for using 4/4 time like you did in 1983.
That made the pop star—and frequent Brit Award winner—ineligible for the show’s artist of the year awards, which had long been split into “best male” and “best female” categories.
When the BPI announced that it would drop gendered categories for the 2022 awards, the move was praised by British musicians and newspapers as long overdue. …
Smith—who was in the running for two awards at Saturday’s event—also criticized the all-male nominees in a recent interview with The Sunday Times, a British newspaper.
But then all the nominees for degendered Artist of the Year were men, largely because men are more popular in British pop music, or at least there are more popular male performers:
The Brits’ best artist category has strict eligibility criteria. Acts must have released either a Top 40 album or two Top 20 singles, within a yearlong period, to make the longlist. This year, only 12 female acts and one nonbinary act qualified, compared with 58 men. The awards’ voting body, made up of some 1,200 music industry insiders, then chooses nominees from the longlist. This year’s voting bloc was 52 percent female.
In an age whose highest value is diversity, it makes sense to defend and extend a traditional way of recognizing diversity: sex-segregated awards. Instead, due to a few self-centered jerks like Sam Smith, the trend is self-defeatingly to give out one prize instead of two.
My view is that entertainment industry awards shows aren’t scientific experiments to find the actual best whatever, they are shows put on to let fans see their favorites honored. So this gender- neutral trend of turning two awards into one is stupid: the more categories, the more winners, and the more fans will be pleased that their heroes and heroines were made happy.
And most fans, other than adolescent girls, are most interested in performers of their own sex.
In general, male performers tend to be more popular than female performers because men aren’t all that interested in women, while women are more broad-minded.
Consider the Academy Awards, where there have been demands to collapse Best Actor and Best Actress into just one Best Actor award and do the same to the two Supporting categories. My view is that most people who might tune in are most interested in the four acting awards because they go to movie stars, and movie stars are the main appeal of the Oscars show. So it would be nuts for the show to shrink from nominating 20 movie stars for four acting awards down to nominating ten for two.
And under gender-neutral conditions, the acting nominations and awards would be dominated by men, who tend to appear in much bigger movies.
Consider the Oscars for 2019, the last time I paid that much attention. The Best Actress award went to Rene Zellweger for her Judy Garland biopic, which made $42 million. The Best Actor award went to Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, which made over a billion bucks. The Best Supporting Actress went to Laura Dern for her small but fun role as the pit bull divorce lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. It’s a good movie, but a little one that made only $2 million in theaters before going quickly to the small screen. The Best Supporting actor went to Brad Pitt in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which made $377 million.
In a head to head competition, of course Phoenix and Pitt would have beaten Zellweger and Dern. So why make them face off when all four can win?
If the Oscars feel it mandatory to have a gender-neutral acting prize, then they should create a fifth acting Oscar: Best Cameo for characters whose scenes don’t make up more than, say, ten minutes of the movie.
For example, the main reasons to see Spielberg’s nearly incident-free autobiopic The Fabelmans is for cameos by Judd Hirsch and David Lynch. Hirsch got nominated for Best Supporting Actor but his role is probably too short to win and Lynch’s appearance was too brief to even be nominated. But they’d be fun entrants in a light-hearted Best Cameo category. This would also be a good category to recognize big box office films like superhero movies or Val Kilmer’s touching mute appearance in Top Gun.
In fact, I think more prizes should be sex-segregated. For example, why pick just one best novelist of the year when you could pick two: one by a woman and one by a man?
