Emma Watson has made history by winning the first ever gender-neutral acting award.
The MTV Movie and TV Awards – also a first – deliberately kept the ‘Best Actor‘ award devoid of gender terms.
Watson pipped Daniel Kaluuya (‘Get Out‘), Hailee Steinfeld (‘The Edge of Seventeen‘), Hugh Jackman (‘Logan‘), James McAvoy (‘Split‘) and Taraji P. Henson (‘Hidden Figures‘) for the win. The idea that Watson’s performance in ‘Beauty and the Beast‘ is worthy of an award over, say, McAvoy’s in ‘Split’ is another matter entirely, but hey – this isn’t the Academy Awards or anything.
She was presented her award by Asia Kate Dillon, who identifies as non-binary and whose character on ‘Billions‘, Taylor Mason, is television’s first ever non-binary character.
“Firstly I feel I have to say something about the award itself—the first acting award in history that doesn’t separate nominees based on their sex,” she said. “It says something about how we perceive the human experience. MTV’s move to create a genderless award for acting will mean something different for everyone. But to me it indicates that acting is about the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and that doesn’t need to be separated into two different categories. Empathy and the ability to use your imagination should have no limits. This is very meaningful for me both to be winning the award and to be receiving it from you, Asia. Thank you for educating me in such an inclusive, patient and loving way. Thank you so much.”
Gendered acting awards have been around since the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, and later imitated by the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Independent Spirit Awards and the British Academy of Film and Television.
In recent years, there’s been a push for awards ceremonies to ditch the division and simply award the best actor (whereby ‘actor’ can be any gender) for that year. Dillon, who goes by the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’, wrote to the Television Academy (which presents the Emmy Awards) this year, asking for clarification in part so they knew which category to enter.
“I’d like to know if in your eyes ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ denote anatomy or identity and why it is necessary to denote either in the first place?” they wrote. “The reason I’m hoping to engage you in a conversation about this is because if the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are in fact supposed to represent ‘best performance by a person who identifies as a woman’ and ‘best performance by a person who identifies as a man’ then there is no room for my identity within that award system binary. Furthermore, if the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are meant to denote assigned sex I ask, respectfully, why is that necessary?”
MTV’s decision to present the gender neutral category is a big push in the direction of acceptance.
