It seems there are a few simple rules that the women of Hollywood must adhere to if they are to win on Oscar night, writes ANNA CAREY
WE ALL KNOW that a woman has never won an Academy Award for Best Director (although with a bit of luck that might all change this Sunday night if Kathryn Bigelow wins for The Hurt Locker). But what, exactly, does a woman have to do to win an Oscar? Well, based on the evidence of the past 71 years, here are a few simple rules . . .
BE YOUNG
While several older ladies have been awarded statuettes (most memorably Jessica Tandy, who won for Driving Miss Daisy), the average age of first-time winners of the Best Actress award is just 31; the average Best Supporting Actress winner is 38. In contrast, the average first-time Best Actor winner is 41, and the Supporting Actor is 48. Is this because decent roles for women dry up as they get older? Or because the Academy is more likely to pay attention to female stars when they're young and, supposedly, most attractive? Or, even more depressingly, both?
BECOME A COSTUME DESIGNER
This category is the only technical one in which men and women have been consistently represented equally. Over the years, 49 per cent of nominees have been female and, impressively, so have 52 per cent of winners. In comparison, just 15 per cent of the Editing nominees have been women, and 12 per cent of the winners. And no women have ever even been nominated for Best Cinematography. But we ladies do love clothes, after all. Speaking of which . . .
BE PREPARED TO HAVE YOUR PHYSICAL APPEARANCE CONSTANTLY DISSECTED IN THE MEDIA FOR WEEKS AFTERWARDS
Who cares how talented a woman is? As we all know, it’s what she wears (and how hideously fat/terrifyingly skinny her body is) to the awards that counts. Even the most eccentric-looking men seldom get the same level of scrutiny. Mickey Rourke, for example, could (and frequently does) parade down the red carpet dressed like a half-naked orange cowboy with a strange love of shiny synthetic fabrics without ending up being mocked over two pages in Grazia.
PLAY UGLY
As celeb magazines and blogs constantly remind us (see the last rule), looking totally gorgeous is the most important thing in every woman's life. So when an actress uglifies herself for a role, we are immediately aware that she's made the ultimate sacrifice for her art. Think brave Oscar-winning women such as Charlize Theron in Monsteror Liz Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Special points go to Nicole Kidman for donning a ludicrous comedy nose in her award-winning turn in The Hours.
PLAY A MAN
The Academy is always keen to make up for the supposed trauma of temporary gender ambiguity by handing over a statuette. The actress Linda Hunt won an Oscar in 1983 for playing a male and (which is the genuinely dodgy bit) Chinese-Australian photographer in The Year of Living Dangerously.
Cross-gender acting is considered even more brave if the actress is usually conventionally actractive. Hilary Swank’s 1999 win for her sensitive portrayal of a young transgender man, Brandon Teena, was followed by months of magazine profiles which stressed how very, very girly she was in real life, which surely must have been a huge relief to us all.
PLAY A PROSTITUTE
Shirley MacLaine famously said that roles for women usually fall into three categories: hookers, victims and doormats. Although this year's Best Actress nominees are, in general, a refreshing change from this rule, it can't be denied that the Academy does love gorgeous actresses pretending to sell their bodies. The very first woman to win an acting Oscar, Janet Gaynor, got her award for playing a prostitute back in 1929 and since then over a dozen actresses, including Kim Basinger ( LA Confidential), Mira Sorvino ( Mighty Aphrodite), Liz Taylor ( Butterfield 8) and Jane Fonda ( Klute) have taken home acting Oscars for playing ladies of the night.
PLAY AN ALCOHOLIC (OR A DRUG ADDICT)
If you can't be a prostitute, you might as well try being a boozer. In 1964, a whopping four out of five nominees for Best Actress played alcoholics and drug addicts. Since then, several other women have won Oscars for playing tragic drunks, most recently Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose. You'd think that playing a prostitute devoted to an alcoholic, as Elisabeth Shue did in 1995's Leaving Las Vegas, would be a guaranteed win, but it seems that Mira Sorvino fulfilled the hooker-playing-winner quota that year.
AND FINALLY . . .
Direct one of the best vampire films ever, make a strangely homoerotic film about surfing and crime, and direct an unsettling, powerful war film while your ex-husband is off making Dances With Smurfs.
Well, we can but hope . . .
