Regardless of whether you managed to stay up until 4am to watch the Oscars live, by now you must have heard the infamous song which opened them – entitled ‘We’ve Seen Your Boobs’. This incendiary choice of presenter for the most important awards in Hollywood has raised many questions about the sexism present in Hollywood and the Academy.
The song featured Macfarlane describing instances in which the actresses had been topless during films and of these, four were during rape scenes (of which two were true stories). This sexualisation of rape goes way beyond the inane, immature sexism of his overall performance. He later spoke about 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, saying that “it’ll be 16 years until she’s too old for Clooney”, and went on to make anti-Semitic remarks about Jews controlling Hollywood, before completing his unpleasant performance with a joke about Chris Brown beating Rihanna. It would take me more time than I have to chronicle every offensive comment he made, in which he discussed such important topics as women having body hair and Adele’s weight. Satirical news website, ‘The Onion’, also tweeted about Quvenzhané, calling her a ‘c***’ (despite later apologising) – how can anyone judge a night where a 9-year-old is mocked, insulted and sexualised rather than being celebrated for her acting ability and maturity as successful?
The inclusion of sexist and racist jokes in his performance becomes even more important when we highlight that Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male. A large portion of the Academy’s voters resemble the House of Lords – white, male and old, and largely out of touch with modern day. Only 14% of them are under 50 and 2% are African American. This clearly misrepresents the movie-going public, but also goes some way to explaining the clear acceptance of inequality present at the Oscars year after year.
The most common response to criticism of this nature is the lamentable “can’t you take a joke?”, but that is not the issue here. Plenty of people who enjoy Macfarlane’s brand of humour (I certainly do) can still understand when he has taken it too far. The predictability of someone being offensive does not excuse them. Tuning into Family Guy, you expect to be shocked and sometimes even a little disgusted by the jokes, but the Oscars are not a place for that. In an industry still dominated by men, where a woman has won the award for best director only once in history and male nominees outnumbered female 140:35 in 2012, the sexist presentation just adds fuel to the fire.
Another defence presented by those who saw Macfarlane’s jokes as harmless is the fact that the actresses involved in the song knew about it beforehand, as proved by their pre-recorded reactions to their names being mentioned. This means nothing. Just because you know someone is going to be rude to you, doesn’t make it any better, and it certainly doesn’t make the level of misogyny exhibited throughout the show acceptable.
We need only glance at the coverage of the event and the questions asked of the celebrities present to see the difference between the treatment of men and women in Hollywood – male actors are asked serious questions about the motivations of their characters while Anne Hathaway is questioned on how she managed to slim down enough to play a dying Fantine in Les Mis. The reduction of actresses to how much they weigh and whether they’ve gone topless trivialises the hard work they put into their performances and belittles their ability.
As with Macfarlane’s offensive remarks, it would take far too long to analyse every aspect of sexism present in Hollywood, but it is clear from this short article just how far the industry has to go in terms of accepting women as successful, capable actresses and directors. What did you think of Seth Macfarlane’s performance – sexist or funny?
Sources: latimes.com, vulture.com, huffingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk
Photo sources: classicfm.com, uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com, guardian.co.uk