Hollywood actress Jameela Jamil has said gender-neutral acting awards at the Oscars would harm women, suggesting that non-binary people should instead have their own awards category.
“This is regarding the Oscars looking to get rid of gendered acting awards. As we see with the director award which is genderless, it’s rare to even see a woman nominated never mind win,” Jamil said in an Instagram post on Saturday.
“I want to open more doors and create more tables, not narrow the opportunities for everyone, including GNC [gender non-conforming] people.”
Jamil is known for her roles in TV series “The Good Place” and Marvel’s “She-Hulk.”
The actress argues that if there were a gender-neutral “athlete of the year” award, a “cis man” would win most of the time.
Jamil said non-binary individuals should have “their own category” at the Oscars rather than allowing Hollywood to “completely shut out women.”
“We should look to EXPAND the possibilities so that both GNC people and women have a fair shot in an industry that has for a long time struggled to treat others equals to men.”
Jamil’s post came as the Oscars is facing increasing pressure to ditch the Best Actor and Best Actress awards in favor of gender-neutral acting awards.
In an open letter published in December, Sasha Stone, who runs AwardsDaily.com, pointed out that “there is most definitely a virtual Civil War raging. The Oscars, if they’re to survive, must stand firm against reimagining themselves as a ‘Woketopia.’”
“As someone who writes up the Women’s Media Center report every year detailing just how hard it’s been for women to break into various categories at the Oscars, from directing to editing to cinematography and on down the line, I know what anyone with common sense should know: the acting categories have always been safe havens,” she wrote.
A study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that of the 13,253 Academy Award nominees between 1929 and 2023, 17 percent were women and 83 percent were men. Six percent were from ethnic minorities.
Following the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite viral campaign that characterized that year’s Oscar nominees as being too white, the overall percentage of minority nominees rose to 17 percent from 8 percent in the eight subsequent years.
However, the televised broadcast of the awards ceremony is also losing viewers amid its attempt at pushing diversity.
The Nielsen ratings for the 2021 Academy Awards fell to 10.5 million viewers, an all-time low. Though the Oscars attracted 16.6 million viewers in 2022, it was still the second-worst rating in history. The 2023 awards attracted 18.8 million.
Multiple other award shows like the Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham Awards, Grammys, and the MTV Movie & TV Awards have all replaced male and female acting awards with gender-neutral ones.
The gender-neutral awards have kicked up controversy over being skewed toward one gender. In November when nominations for the Independent Spirit Awards’ gender-neutral “Best Lead Performance” were announced, 8 out of the 10 nominated individuals were women. In the “Best Supporting Performance” category, seven nominees were men.
The push for Oscars and other awards to go gender-neutral is part of a wider attempt to erase biological sex differences. In a June 7 interview with Joshua Philipp for EpochTV’s “Crossroads,” author Steve Deace pointed out that while the sexual revolution of the 1960s tried to insist that there were multiple gender or sexual identities, the new sexual culture war attempts to “reject them altogether.”
The new LGBT ideologies insist that “I’m not even the same person I was created or born as. I’m not male, I’m not female. I’m non-binary,” he said. “In this case, someone is asking me right from the outset that I have to agree to their psychosis, I have to agree to their rejection of reality.”
The attempt to erase gender is now prevalent across the cultural spectrum. Earlier this year, it was reported that new editions of Roald Dahl’s children’s books were being edited by Puffin Books to remove gendered identities.
For instance, “Cloud-Men” in “James and the Giant Peach” was given a gender-neutral term, referring to them as “Cloud-People.”
In September, a California high school principal’s decision to abolish the titles of homecoming king and queen and replace them with gender-neutral “homecoming royalty” faced pushback from parents.