rebels at _either_ a man or a woman telling women how to "look like women." (Hello! By _definition_ she already does, just not the kind of woman you prefer to see!)
[...]
Kathryn Bigelow finally making a movie that was dudely enough to win the Oscars (not that she's dudely, or even that The Hurt Locker was especially dudely in the way it was directed; on the contrary, Bigelow was honest about men in a way I've never seen a male director be. But. The movie was still all. about. dudes.)
[...]
On the one hand, having _three_ (count 'em! Three!) trans women on television at once, and _none_ of them is either a) a sex worker b) a _dead_ sex worker c) played by a cis woman and d) played by a cis man--well, that's an accomplishment. [...]
However...a makeover show? Really? Do I even have to go into what an enormous minefield that is--with the double whammy of policing acceptable feminine behavior coupled with the underlying theme about the artificiality of a trans woman's gender?
It's fantastic to see black filmmakers recognized -- just as it's fantastic to see a woman win best director, even if it's for a distinctly testosteroney film -- but that hardly means we've transcended demeaning stereotypes. Don't get me wrong -- Mo'Nique did a marvelous job with the material. But that material was, in one critic's description, "an over-the-top political fantasy that works only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people" -- and Hollywood doesn't seem to have wrestled too hard with the question of why such movies are frequently crowd pleasers.
[...] when four of the year's most beloved movies contain problematic racial tropes, it's a bit premature to congratulate the Academy or ourselves for having come so far in the last 82 years. I mean, please, don't make me bring up "Crash."
California Watch: To test the pre-Oscars hypothesis, Flowing Data's Nathan Yau crunched some numbers and found that, "Only 10 out of the past 29 winners, or just over a third, had the most nominations their year. Take a look at the data since 1980."