[many salient points deleted for space]
 
* But there were serious, less obvious, problems with the presentation of
* women and film at the Oscars.  Watching the film tribute to women in
* Hollywood movies made me think of feminist film criticism a la Laura
* Mulvey about the male gaze of the camera.  Usually, I take issue with such
* criticism as too reductive, but scene after scene in this montage of women
* in the movies involved women presented to the camera simply as objects of
* voyeuristic fantasy.
*
I was kind of curious myself at the meek nature of women in attendance at the
awards, and their seeming good nature about the shameless attempt to
reconcile a policy failure by having a "Women's Nite at the Oscars." Emma
Thompson came closest to an attiude of censure, but even that was tepid.
(I'll allow it's hard to accept an award and then scream at the awarding
body, but perhaps the key here was maybe they shouldn't have accepted? Or
accepted but in absentia?)
 
Having said that, the compilation piece meant to give women tribute was not
as bad as Ben made it out to be. There were a fair number of shots excerpted
to show off the past and present beauties of Hollywood, but I didn't get upset
because:
There were a siginificant number of scenes that did a good job of showing
women in strong and varying roles. Susan Sarandon reading a story to her
terminal son in Lorenzo's Oil is a good example.
Aha, you may say--"mother," another typical Hollywood part for females.
But motherhood IS a facet of being female, and as such is a perfectly
natural film role.  There's no excuse for a film history of women that
highlights all the "good performances" by mothers and daughters and
housewives whose characters are solely defined that way, but you wouldn't
leave those same performances out just because there are other ways to define
women.
Also, there is nothing evil about enjoying the physical charisma some of the
great actresses exuded on screen. The thinness of the way their characters
were/are defined is lamentable, but it doesn't erase the fact that a 40-foot
Audrey Hepburn is something that grabs your attention as you sit in a
theater. I think men AND women will always laud beautiful, charismatic
people. The trouble is (bluntly) men get to be ugly and successful, women
much less so.
 
So I think the event on the whole was pretty gross, but the little tribute
film was actually kind of neat to watch.
 
 
--
Mark Bunster                      |I'm a Christian, and my ears are not
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