The Anatomically Correct Oscar

Guerrilla girls ,as they say in their website, are feminist activist artists. They wear gorilla masks in public and their main goal is to expose the corruption in politics, art, culture etc by using humor. They do projects like posters, videos, stickers and action books. One of the projects they have done is “The Anatomically Correct Oscar” billboard in 2002. The billboard is a message to expose the inequality in the Oscars. We can see in the poster, they used facts like ” best director has never been awarded to a woman”, “92.8% of the writing awards have gone to men”, ” only 5.5% of the acting awards have gone to people of color”. At the left top of the billboard, we see an illustration of the Oscar replaced with a “white man” and right next to the illustration it says “He’s white & male, just like the guys who win!” After the poster went up at 2002, it got a lot of attention and at the 2002 Academy Awards Ceremony, Halle Berry won the first Best Actress award as an African-American woman. In that year, Denzel Washington also won the Best Actor award and became the second ever African American man that received this award. We can say that this poster might have affected the Academy Award judges. After all, Kathryn Bigelow for the first woman that won the Best Director award in 2010. Isn’t it strange that the first woman who won the Best Director award in 2010 although the first Academy Awards was held in 1929? Academy Awards needs to improve itself about the discrimination of the woman and people of color. This award ceremony shouldn’t be dominated by white man and by drawing attention to this topic in a humorous way like Guerrilla girls did, Oscar winners can be more diversed.