No gender star will rise

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They were still separated according to sex: Berlinale winners 2020 Elio Germano and Paula Beer

For 64 years the Berlinale has been awarding a prize for the best actor and one for the best actress. The 65th year of the award pair is over: As the Berlin Film Festival announced on Monday, there will be gender-neutral awards from 2021 - one for the best leading role, one for the best supporting role.

"No longer separating the awards in the acting field by gender is a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry," said the management duo of the Berlinale, Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, justifying the change.

That doesn't convince everyone in the film industry by any means. "In making its decision, the Berlinale management ignores the existing unequal balance of power, which, as everywhere, is firmly anchored in the industry and in the structures of the festivals," says a statement by Pro Quote Film. The "pseudo gender-neutral acting award" will not change anything "in the system of inequality of opportunity, neither for women * nor for people of different sexes". On the contrary, it will be strengthened, says Barbara Rohm, Chairwoman of Pro Quote Film.

The German Drama Association expressed a similar opinion: "With its decision, the Berlinale is trying to be more politically correct than correct and is doing the important goals of achieving gender and diversity justice in the truest sense of the word a disservice," says Leslie Malton, head of the association.

If prices changed so much ...

Behind the armored rhetoric, which is uncomfortably reminiscent of the quarrel among feminists about transphobia ("The woman category is being abolished!"), There is, however, a good argument: There are far fewer interesting, meaningful roles for actresses than for actors. Women lead films less often, have significantly fewer scenes and significantly fewer words. A separate price can therefore be useful to distinguish the achievements of women from the crowd of male competition.

But does such a price change something in the greater injustices in the industry, as postulated by Pro Quote and the Drama Association?

If so, these injustices should actually have been overcome for decades, in the case of the Berlinale even for 64 years. After all, all major festivals and industry awards, from Cannes to Venice, from the Emmys to the Oscars, have given awards that have been broken down by gender since they came into being. It is obvious: these prizes alone did not bring about more representation and, above all, more opportunities for women; this required and still needs much larger and earlier measures in terms of training, film funding and programming.

There are only a handful of awards that are symbolically so powerful that they change the course in the industry - the director's Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow was one of them, as was the golden palm for Jane Campion. At the Berlinale, on the other hand, not even the main prize, the Golden Bear, attracts a noteworthy cinema audience. In 2021, a globally visible gender star will not rise above the Berlinale Palast when the gender-neutral prizes are awarded for the first time.

But prices can be changed

But that does not mean that nothing should or can change with price cuts. In an industry in motion, at best, the small changes add up to a big change. The move away from the binary division into men and women in acting can be an impulse among many to no longer commit people to traditional gender images. In the USA, the non-binary TV star Asia Kate Dillon from "Billions" has asked the Emmy Academy to do so several times. The MTV Movie & TV Awards lifted the gender separation back in 2017. The winners to date: Emma Watson, Chadwick Bosman, Lady Gaga.

You can also expect as much caution as with the MTV Awards from the upcoming Berlinale jury, which, as usual, will have equal representation. There will hardly be two prizes for actors who identify themselves as men - the gender awareness in the industry is now too great, thanks also to initiatives such as Pro Quote Film. Unless there is a rush of films with non-binary performers, one price for a woman and one for a man is much more likely. There might even be two winners.

At some point, that is clear, there will be two men. But by then the industry will hopefully have caught up and the men between the winner for best director and the winner for best film are doing really well.