Anyone who’s ever had a cursory glimpse at Australian cinema, browsed either of Screen Australia’s recent reports on gender or cultural diversity, or been just, y’know, generally aware of the world can tell you our media industry is fucking stuffed full of white men.
And with tonight being the main AACTA award ceremony (think the Logies but somehow both more prestigious and embarrassingly named), what better time and place for activists dressed as penises to point this out:
Protesters dressed as sausages chanting to “end the sausage party” of the Aust. film industry forcefully ejected from #aactas red carpet pic.twitter.com/8aeM0p1UdV
— steph harmon (@stephharmon) December 7, 2016
Members of Women In Film & Television NSW (WIFT) chanted “end the sausage party” to a pretty mixed response on the red carpet; footage on Twitter shows crowd members clearly loving it, while also capturing security and cops as they fucking shove the protestors around.
While the women look like they took it all in stride, I feel like slamming non-violent protestors to the ground is both a) an extreme over-reaction and b) counterproductive to them leaving, which it looks like they’re trying to do at any rate:
“End the sausage party”
These sausages slipped into the AACTA awards demanding gender equality. @abcnews @abcnewsSydney pic.twitter.com/NsJ6iZwMzS
— Nick Dole (@NicholasDole) December 7, 2016
Filmmaker and activist Sophie Mathison told The Age that just two narrative feature films of the 28 showcased in the 2016 screening tour were by women, and, more specifically, WIFT are calling on AACTA to introduce a gender equity charter:
“I don’t think there is a group of men sitting in a room conspiring to exclude women.”“I think we are dealing with a screen industry that has had no significant shift in the statistics of female engagement in 40 years.”
Back to the industry side of things, tonight’s event does show some signs that Australia is at least inching towards a more diverse TV ecosystem, with the Best TV Comedy nominees including a mix of race, class, gender, sexuality and mental health: ‘Black Comedy,’ ‘The Family Law,‘ ‘Please Like Me‘ and ‘Upper Middle Bogan‘.
Still, tonight’s lifetime achievement award is going to Paul Hogan, so swings and roundabouts I guess.
Finally, the protesters have posted an accompanying video set to Peaches’ ‘Dick In The Air,’ cut to an introduction by AACTA president and noted pirate Geoffrey Rush. Peaches is reportedly 100% behind the protest, and is apparently going to run the video featuring her song.
And it is something all right, see for yourself below:
P.S. Unrelated to all this, Red Dog was there tonight! Look at his confused little face, I doubt he even knows what an AACTA award is:
The only star that really matters on the #AACTAs red carpet #RedDog #dog @reddog pic.twitter.com/6F1Du44Qwf
— Danielle McGrane (@DanielleMcGrane) December 7, 2016
Source: The Age.
Photo: Twitter.
