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00:00While awards season always has its fair share of ups and downs,
00:03some have begun noticing that a very particular trend
00:07seems to be happening with recent Best Actress Oscar winners,
00:11namely Mikey Madison for Enora and Emma Stone for Poor Things.
00:15But it's actually not a new trend at all,
00:18but instead seems to be a resurgence of an old-school problem.
00:22So is it actually a signifier of a problematic shift backwards,
00:26or just a bit of a coincidence?
00:28Let's take a closer look at these roles,
00:31the larger context, and what it all really means.
00:34It is your body, Bella Baxter. Yours to give freely.
00:37With Mikey Madison cinching the Best Actress win for her role in Enora
00:41just a year after Emma Stone nabbed hers for her role in Poor Things,
00:45some have begun to worry that this is a sign of a shift backwards for the Academy.
00:49For a long time, there seemed to be an unspoken implication that,
00:54if a young woman wanted to be taken seriously as an actress,
00:57and maybe win an Oscar, she needed to take on a gritty role.
01:02And gritty pretty much always meant either wearing some prosthetics to make her look less Hollywood hot,
01:07or being highly sexual.
01:09It became such a trope that Seth MacFarlane even opened the 2013 Oscars with a satirical,
01:15yet still off-putting song about how everyone had seen the boobs of so many of the actresses.
01:20Meryl Streep, we saw your boobs in Silkwood, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.
01:27Yikes.
01:28Sexuality, sex work, and even straight-up nudity has actually been a part of film since its very beginning.
01:33The very first Best Actress Oscar actually went to Janet Gaynor for her role as Angela,
01:39in 1928's Street Angel.
01:40As a young woman who turns to prostitution to make ends meet in hard times,
01:45this was all put to an end with the Hays Code,
01:48which barred any licentious or suggestive nudity, in fact or in silhouette,
01:52and excessive or lustful kissing.
01:55The Code had in particular noted that women selling their virtue
01:59should be treated with special care,
02:01to the end of that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated,
02:05and that good taste may be emphasized.
02:08We can see this change, for example, in the adaptation of From Here to Eternity.
02:13In the book, Alma, played by Donna Reed, is an active sex worker.
02:17But in the 1953 film, they had to make that just part of her past.
02:22But once the Code was done away with a few decades later,
02:25there was an explosion of more realistic depictions of all of the many aspects of life
02:31that had been forced off-screen by the Code.
02:33Drugs, violence, sex, etc.
02:36As the Code's power began to wane and the 60s were to life,
02:39there were a number of high-profile films about working girls,
02:43like Butterfield 8, for which Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar.
02:47Part of the Code had been focused on keeping women's so-called modesty intact.
02:51And so it's no surprise that there was then a reaction
02:54of women taking control of their sexualities on screen once it was possible again,
02:59especially as this all concided with the rise of second-wave feminism.
03:03While actresses continued to be nominated and win for all kinds of roles,
03:07there was still an undercurrent of a need to be subversive to get the Academy's attention,
03:12and that often meant being nude to some degree.
03:15Halle Berry's role as Letitia in Monster's Ball, for example,
03:19for which she became the first-ever Black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar,
03:23was hit with criticism at the time because of how over-sexualized the character was.
03:28Professor of Film Mia L. Mask wrote,
03:31Many viewers interpreted the film's sex scenes as reproducing the pornographic gaze
03:35at the Black female body, thereby re-stigmatizing Black feminine sexuality.
03:41Some might think that in our modern era, we've moved past these kinds of discussions,
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05:09In the wake of the Me Too movement, there have been lots of important conversations about on-screen sex and nudity,
05:16whether it's empowering or degrading,
05:18the degree to which it can create awkward or even totally unsafe issues on set, and more.
05:24And while there have been some great strides forward on many of these fronts,
05:28some people have started to feel like there's been a growing backlash against this kind of thinking altogether.
05:33The most on-the-nose contribution to this so far has been not a film, but a TV show.
05:40HBO's The Idol, which took great pain to let the audience know how upset its main female character was
05:47about safety protocols that had been put in place.
05:50So I'm not allowed to show my body?
05:53You realize how f***ing annoying and insane that sounds?
05:56It's actually very progressive.
05:58It's to make sure she doesn't feel pressured.
05:59The show exemplifies a certain subset of the consent backlash, but also another key element of the issue.
06:06These roles are so often written by men for women to perform a Hollywood version of empowerment
06:12that just so happens to require them to take their clothes off.
06:16And this is the core of the central question that plagues the two recent Best Actress-winning roles.
06:21Given everything we know about Hollywood, how do we draw the line between empowerment and exploitation?
06:27Poor Things was a lightning rod for this discussion last year.
06:31Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, an updated Frankenstein's monster brought to life by Dr. Goodwin Baxter.
06:38She was a grown woman, but when she died, he took the brain from the baby she was carrying,
06:43put it in her, and sparked her back to life.
06:46When we first meet Bella, she's very baby-like, babble and all.
06:50So the fact that the film then speedruns her growth and has her quickly become hypersexual
06:55was pretty creepy, to say the least, for many viewers.
06:59But it doesn't feel particularly exploitative,
07:02both because within the story, she is the one that gets to be in control of her own sexuality and choices.
07:07And your sad face makes me discover angry feelings for you.
07:13And because behind the scenes, Emma herself had control over the project as a producer.
07:18Bella's sexuality, it's an incredibly important part of the story.
07:21The human experience is fascinating to her.
07:23Sex is a major part of that.
07:25Now, a year later, Mikey Madison has taken home the award for her role as the titular Anora,
07:31though she makes everyone call her Annie, a stripper working in Brooklyn, New York.
07:35She gets swept up in a whirlwind, week-long romance with Vanya,
07:38only to have her fairy tale quickly come crashing back down to earth.
07:42The film features numerous love scenes, and a scantily clad Annie throughout.
07:47And can at times, particularly in the very beginning,
07:50feel like it's more interested in titillation than storytelling?
07:54While the film as a whole doesn't really focus on sexuality to a degree that feels exploitative,
07:59it does have its own share of problems,
08:02which we break down more in-depth in our full video on that film if you'd like to watch it next to learn more.
08:06It's really more that it comes on the heels of poor things, both directed and written by men,
08:12and within a larger societal context that now feels like it's hurtling backwards.
08:17It's entirely unfair to say that any of these awards were won just because of the sexualization of the characters.
08:23But when looked at within the larger trend in Hollywood,
08:26and in comparison to the winning male roles, it does raise some questions.
08:31Other recent winners, like Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once,
08:35or Renee Zellweger for Judy, or even Emma's other win for La La Land,
08:39do thankfully provide a counterpoint to this narrative as well.
08:43Or at least the hope that these wins are more of a coincidence rather than a true emerging trend.
08:48But regardless, the Oscars continue to run into a whole host of issues.
08:53The Academy is still dealing with major issues around, for example,
08:57who is even nominated in the first place, and who continues to be left out.
09:01Halle is still the only Black woman to win Best Actress, even almost a quarter of a century after her win.
09:08International films and their performances have to vie for just a few spots,
09:12and deal with the uphill battle of even getting the Academy voters to watch a film that isn't in English.
09:18There's category fraud that can keep people from being recognized for smaller roles,
09:22as they get pushed out by people who should be in the main category going for supporting to up their chance to win.
09:28Because votes are often based more on who is best at playing the Hollywood game,
09:33and how hard their PR team is willing and able to go for them,
09:37there are so many people who are considered legends who have never won, or often even been nominated.
09:43And even genre can hold an acclaimed film back when it comes to the Oscars.
09:47Many were surprised by Demi Moore's loss,
09:50having assumed that the Academy would have jumped at the chance to award a longtime Hollywood star
09:55for a gritty comeback role in a movie that got a lot of buzz.
09:58But the Academy's disinterest in, and to be honest, arrogance towards,
10:03horror likely played a big part here.
10:06Even though the horror genre has long been home to many intense, great, even gritty,
10:11in both the actual sense and the nudity sense, performances,
10:15it's often been shunned for being not real art.
10:19Only a small handful of actresses have won Oscars for their roles in horror films,
10:23Natalie Portman being the most recent with 2010's Black Swan.
10:27There's also, for actresses at least, the question of age.
10:31The Best Actress Award has historically tended towards rewarding young ingenues,
10:36with an exception here and there.
10:38Many actresses find themselves doing what they feel like is some of their best work in middle age or later in life,
10:44but come to find their work being ignored.
10:47Many thought that Nicole Kidman was a shoo-in this year for her work in Baby Girl,
10:50which was both critically acclaimed and highly sexual.
10:54But she didn't even get a nomination.
10:56Though thankfully, as a whole, this does seem to be a trend that the Academy has actually been moving past for good,
11:02as it's been pretty consistently doling out the award to middle-aged and older actresses over the past decade.
11:08It's easy to hand-wave these kinds of discussions away under the assumption that they don't matter.
11:13But while sure, who wins a golden statue on one night in Los Angeles isn't really,
11:16on its own, incredibly consequential, especially with everything else going on right now,
11:21these kinds of things are reflections of larger issues within our society as a whole.
11:26So it's not surprising or weird that people have thoughts about it all.
11:30Even if the back-to-back poor things in Anora wins aren't yet indicative of some more long-term shift,
11:36it's still worthwhile to take a step back and think about the kinds of films and roles that are being rewarded,
11:41and the ones that are being left out,
11:44and the larger trend of rewarding voyeurs looking into experiences that they've never shared.
11:49For example, men writing stories about what they think women are like,
11:53over films written by people about their own experiences.
11:56For example, women writing about their own sexuality.
11:59After years of oscillating between chaos and being incredibly boring,
12:03maybe it's a good sign that this year's Oscars has mostly just led to some important conversations about film,
12:10and the stories we choose to share and uphold.
12:13The biggest thing that will help with the Oscars' continued growth
12:16is just continuing to induct more people into the voting body,
12:20and importantly, a much wider range of people than they have in the past.
12:24They have been working on this over the past few years, but it's still an ongoing process.
12:29And as for the over-sexualization issue in particular,
12:32we'll hopefully keep moving away from the idea that women are supposed to be any one way,
12:37modest or sexualized or whatever else,
12:40and instead continue to try to foster a world in which all different kinds of women and experiences
12:45are allowed to flourish and have their stories told by themselves.
12:50That's The Take.
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