Berlin Film Festival Ditching ‘Actor’ & ‘Actress’ Awards To Be More Gender Neutral

In an attempt to be more “gender-sensitive” the festival organizers announced it will stop awarding separate acting prizes to women and men at their next event in 2021.

Festival directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian issued a public statement on Monday which said: “We believe that not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry“.

RT reports: While the ‘Silver Bear’ awards were previously given separately to actors and actresses, typical for entertainment award ceremonies, the categories will now be combined and celebrate the “best leading performance” and “best supporting performance.” 

The change will be in effect for the next festival, which is set to take place in February 2021. The event will be partly in-person, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

Defending the decision to host a physical event, organizers said the “lively relationship with the audience” is an “important and unique feature” of festivals. “In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm,” they added.

The Berlin Film Festival is the first major one to make the move to genderless awards, with Cannes, Venice, and others still separating their acting prizes by gender. However, there has been a concerted push to remove gender from acting categories in recent years, and the MTV Movie and TV Awards made waves by implementing the concept in 2017.

Another major change occurring at the festival is that the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize will be replaced by the Silver Bear Jury Prize. The Alfred Bauer award had previously been suspended when controversy arose over the fact that the filmmaker the prize was named after, Bauer, was a high-ranking member of the Nazi Party.

While genderless awards fit with modern times and the frequent calls for less gender separation, some online pointed out that entertainment awards have a controversial history when it comes to nominating women and men equally in categories where they directly compete. The Academy Awards in the US, for instance, has only nominated five women for the Best Director Oscar in its 90-plus year history.

We all know this means female performances getting sidelined the same way female directors are in gender neutral awards for best director... https://t.co/7KTlJr39ha

— Ronaldo Trancoso Jr (@ronaldotrancoso) August 24, 2020

Source: News Punch