I’ve been thinking a lot about representation and cinema leading up to the Oscars this Sunday (details forthcoming!), especially the way that films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk are billed as gay blockbusters, or films like Sicko or An Inconvenient Truth are used for political leverage, or people endlessly debate whether Crash is racist or Million Dollar Baby endorses euthanasia or Slumdog Millionaire romanticizes poverty.  It struck me that for all of the politicization of the Oscars, the question of whether films are or aren’t feminist is probably about fiftieth on the list.  

I’m torn as to why this is.  Is it because gender is so omnipresent that it dissolves into the background and a film only seems “gendered” when it bluntly and unapologetically foregrounds it?  Or because lots of viewers are so used to divorcing gender from related topics that Juno becomes a film about teen pregnancy and Maria Full of Grace becomes a film about drug trafficking without too much fanfare about how gendered those phenomena are?  Or is it because gender is normalized by the Academy - for example, by award categories like Best Actor and Best Actress - in a way that other identities are not, making it less likely to seem like a hot-button issue from year to year?  In nominated films, gender usually becomes incidental as a filmic technique to convey other messages or plot arcs rather than being explored as a kind of identity or way of being in the world, and that seems very different from the way race, ethnicity, and sexuality are routinely treated by the Academy.  And while audiences certainly talk about portrayals of women in film, you don’t often see someone accept an award and give a stirring speech about how their film was a call to arms to end sexism in the way that you do with a lot of other politicized groups.  

The Oscars are this Sunday, and it’ll be interesting to see if this comes up.  Are there any films this year that people consider strongly pro-feminist or anti-feminist?  And taking a step back, is it possible for Hollywood to be pro-feminist at all, or does the nature of the industry sort of foreclose any sort of critical engagement with feminist politics?