The Gotham Film & Media Institute, announced on Thursday that The Best Actor and Best Actress categories for independent feature films will be replaced with Outstanding Lead Performance and Outstanding Supporting Performance.
A press statement from the institute stated that acting will no longer be defined by gender. Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of The Gotham Film & Media Institute said, “We are proud to recognize outstanding acting achievements each year, and look forward to a new model of honoring performances without binary divisions of gender. We are grateful to those who helped to start this conversation in recent years and we are thrilled that the Gotham Awards will continue to support artistic excellence in a more inclusive and equitable way.”
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The institute which has had a legacy of awards under its ‘Breakthrough Series’, will now begin presenting the ‘Outstanding Performance in a New Series’ starting this year, the statement read. In addition to this, the Gotham Breakthrough Actor Awards will be renamed Gotham Breakthrough Performer Award. The recipents of this award in the past have been Amy Adams, Elliot Page, Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson and Anya Taylor-Joy.
There will be up to 10 nominees in each of the three new categories including Outstanding Lead Performance, Outstanding Supporting Performance and Outstanding Performance in a New Series.
The American award event that acts as a run-up to the Oscars, has now opened its Best Documentary Feature category to international submissions as well, in a bid to promote inclusion.
While netizens lauded Gotham’s announcement, several Twitter users criticized the move and implied that the step might come as tokenistic in that it does not guarantee the nomination of the under-represented genders.
The announcement does not mention any terms of representation for women and other genders.
One Twitter user wrote, “Gotham awards just announced they’re no longer doing gendered award categories and condensing them into just one lead & one supporting performance, which in theory is great and definitely more inclusive but what is the incentive to not just award white cis men all the time then? It isn’t more inclusive in reality unless you consider performances by women and other genders with equal weight to the consideration given male performers who are lauded ad nauseam for any sort of ‘transformation’ or emotional role”.
Another user wrote, “I think groups like the Gotham awards will be good tests. If it turns out that these are negatively effecting women we should be aware of that and see if we can recalibrate somehow”.