The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced last Wednesday that the org will follow the lead of the Spirit and Gotham Awards by abandoning gender-based acting awards. When LAFCA members vote in December they’ll hand out two Best Lead Performance trophies (either gender or gender-neutral) and two awards for Best Supporting Performance (ditto).
But the vote, I’ve been told, was far from unanimous. In fact, it was damn near evenly split. It can be reported, in short, that nearly half of LAFCA doesn’t agree with the hardcore LGBTQ-supporting woke apparatchiks within the organization.
I’m told there’s a certain Stalinist fervor within this gender-neutral cabal — a belief that they’re doing God’s revolutionary work by dissolving gender and opening things up to all sorts of wrinkles, attitudes and permutations.
There’s also a conviction that anyone who doesn’t agree 100% on this issue is a naysayer or a foot-dragger, and that the apparatchicks therefore need to band together to make sure that the other side (i.e., those who believe that gender-based acting awards should be kept and that this will benefit actresses) is out-maneuvered or otherwise marginalized.
The LAFCA gang met last Saturday (10.8) in West Los Angeles, and the gender-neutral acting awards vote was 27 in favor, 22 against and with four abstentions. I’m told that the historical tendency has been for abstentions to translate into negative votes (i.e., voters who don’t necessarily agree but don’t want to argue or alienate), so let’s presume that the vote came down to 27 for, 26 against.
And that’s not counting the members who decided to vote in favor of the gender-neutral thing because they’re mice, and that it seemed safer to go along than to face challenges.
It was announced at the meeting that LAFCA had 60 members before the vote, and that a new admission made the tally 61.
I’m told that even discussing the gender-neutral vote appeared to alarm the apparatchiks. The topic of “nonbinary”-identified people is considered part and parcel of the larger discussion of LGBTQ rights — a zero-sum discussion.
Not incompatible: (a) gay couples and their families being entitled to equal protection under the law and (b) women being entitled to the dignity of acting categories which recognize that sex is an essential component of performance, and are therefore worthy of separate recognition.
Let’s imagine that a LAFCA member who doesn’t favor gender-neutral acting awards had spelled out his/her reasons for being against it. What would they say? How would they make their case?
The main argument, I would think, is that gender-neutral awards are arguably anti-woman.
Boiled down, the LAFCA system wasn’t broke so why the hell did the apparatchicks insist on “fixing” it? I’ll tell you why. Because wokeism is a cult and a newfound religion, and it’s believed that people who don’t parrot and follow the wokester line are on the wrong side of history. Kind of the same philosophy shared by Tom Courtenay‘s “Strelnikov”, the supporting character in David Lean‘s Dr. Zhivago.
A LAFCA member with senior standing: “I didn’t attend the meeting because I completely disagreed about their decision to revamp the acting awards by doing away with gender distinctions.”
