I know not to expect much from the Academy Awards. I know that the Oscar show is inevitably boring and long-winded. I know that the nominations are disappointing. I know that, quite often, films that I don't think deserve to win end up winning. I know that we can expect self-important political drivel from presenters and award winners [Gee, I wonder if Richard Gere _was_ able to change Deng's mind about Tibet? :-)]. But this women if film theme was such an extreme example of tokenism, half-hearted praise, and hot air that I feel like I have to complain to SOMEONE about it and (lucky you) Screen-L seemed like the logical place. To get the obvious out of the way: the Liza Minelli number was appalling. Nobody said anything constructive about [tho' a few people mentioned the fact that] 1992 was a _terrible_ year for women's roles in Hollywood films. The Whiggish story of women just getting stronger and stronger in the film industry by working harder and harder is simply not the case [example: in the feature on editing before the award for best editing, the Academy mentioned that, at first, editing was seen as menial work and, therefore, done mainly by women. But then, it became a profession in its own right. What the Academy failed to mention that as editing became a profession, men became a more dominant part of the process.]. Barriers to women's entry into the film industry take place at a far lower level than who gets an oscar nomination. The PROBLEM is that there are so few women directors in Hollywood, NOT that Penny Marshall and (ouch) Barbra Streisand aren't getting academy award nominations. And the fact that the evenings theme music was "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" bears mentioning, as well. 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. Well, this note has grown long and I had intended it more to illicit other responses to the Oscar show (and for that matter the awards, which I haven't really mentioned) than to toot my own horn. So I'll wrap this note up . . . -- Ben Alpers Princeton University