In a Trumpian Hollywood, men honored for playing tortured geniuses, women for playing sex workers
The stars of ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘The Brutalist,’ ‘Anora’ and ‘Poor Things’ deserve their accolades, but there’s a disturbing pattern here
Mikey Madison, who played a sex worker in Anora, accepts the best actress award from Emma Stone, who played a sex worker in Poor Things. Photo by Getty Images
As Mikey Madison took the stage at last Sunday’s Academy Awards, some viewers might not have noticed that, for the past two years running, the Oscar for best actress has gone to a woman playing a sex worker. First there was Emma Stone’s lab-monster-cum-happy-hooker in Poor Things. This year, we got Madison playing Ani, a foul-mouthed Brooklyn lap-dancer and escort in Anora. It may be too early to call this a trend. And to be sure, Madison’s performance was vivid and compelling. She and Stone are also far from the first to win accolades for their portrayals of prostitutes. It might also be mentioned that, in some quarters of the political left, sex work itself is seen as empowering and even liberating.
Yet, during the same two-year time period, the best actor Oscars have gone to men playing, first, a world historical nuclear physicist (Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer) and, this year, a groundbreaking architect (Adrian Brody in The Brutalist).
The disparity is glaring. It also seems worth noting that all four films were written and directed by men who, in an age of depleted theater attendance, fancy themselves auteurs of the big screen, as opposed to commercial directors of the action adventure-type movies that still attract mass audiences. The latest batch of Oscar wins makes me wonder if, as a culture, we still regard the most dramatic and significant plot point in a woman’s life to be her youth, beauty and sexual availability. (In Poor Things, heroine Bella Baxter is supposed to have the brain of an infant, so can hardly even be considered a young adult.) Meanwhile, men continue to be celebrated for building and inventing things that change the face of the earth and the course of history.
If Kamala Harris were president right now, these wins might merit a shrug. But given that every branch of the U.S. government including the military is currently headed up by a person possessed of XY chromosomes who has been held liable for sexual abuse, and the cabinet includes multiple men accused of sexual assault, it’s difficult not to conclude that, even outside of Hollywood, women have been demoted.
Hollywood, too, has done better in the past. Between 2021 and 2023, Michelle Yeoh, Frances McDormand, and Jessica Chastain won Oscars for playing a sci-fi warrior, a nomadic widow, and a televangelist, respectively. And in the recent past, we’ve seen top actresses take star turns as larger-than-life figures like Katherine Graham, Queen Elizabeth, and Erin Brockovich.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck in a competing paradigm — one that is on depressing display in Oppenheimer itself. Played by Florence Pugh, the character of Jean Tatlock — in real life, the first female graduate of Stanford Medical School, a brilliant psychoanalyst, and Communist — is shown topless and astride the scientist within minutes of her character being introduced on screen. (The other female lead, Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s neglected and long-suffering wife, Kitty, spends her days looking beleaguered while pulling laundry from a clothesline.)
Going into this year’s Oscars, the big question was whether Madison would win for best actress or the honor would go to 1980s “it-girl” Demi Moore for her unsettling performance in the horror film The Substance. Playing an over-50 TV fitness instructor who is laid off for age-related reasons, Moore is so desperate to reclaim her lost youth that she willingly injects a mysterious substance into herself, which causes her to violently vacate her body and intermittently inhabit that of a dewy woman half her age (played by Margaret Qualley). Insofar as Moore’s character soon discovers that everyone wants a piece of her nubile self, not her authentic menopausal one, it appeared to some moviegoers this week that the Oscar going to 25-year-old Madison, not 62-old Moore, precisely mirrored the message of the movie.
But the larger irony here may be that Moore and Madison’s roles aren’t that far apart: Both presume a universe where a woman’s only value lies in her firm flesh and sexual allure, her character and intellect be damned. This is also a universe in which female friendship and camaraderie are either nonexistent or in short supply.
It’s the job of the Oscars to celebrate the best performances, wherever they are found. And both Madison and Stone were stand-outs. But the film world also needs to consider its role in reinforcing this backlash moment — a moment where the Manosphere has replaced #MeToo. And the only women who appear to have political power are Barbified stooges and mouthpieces for a president who, in addition to being a budding autocrat and sex pest, once owned beauty pageants. Trump is also known for rating women’s bodies on a scale of 1 to 10, as if they were show horses, and not human beings.
Given the current dystopia, any cause for celebration should be embraced. Still, it matters what is being celebrated. Right now, we need more stories about women triumphing in all sorts of arenas, not just ones that insist on reducing them to sexual objects. Hollywood, get on it!
