MTV scraps gender-specific categories for movie & TV awards

Films will now compete in the same categories as TV series too, as MTV shakes up its ceremony, saying its audience ‘doesn’t see male-female dividing lines’

The MTV movie & TV awards have scrapped their best actor and actress categories, instead opting for a single gender-neutral acting category that will be open to both male and female actors.

The move comes as part of a major overhaul for the event that will see awards for TV series included for the first time, as well as series and films competing in the same categories.

The nominees for the inaugural best actor in a movie includes Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya, Beauty and the Beast’s Emma Watson, and Hidden Figures’ Taraji P Henson. The best actor in a show category, meanwhile, sees Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke compete against Stranger Things’s Millie Bobby Brown and Atlanta’s Donald Glover, among others.

MTV’s decision to make their awards gender-neutral comes at a time when the issue of separate male and female acting awards is generating much discussion. This week Asia Kate Dillon, who identifies as gender non-binary, wrote a letter to Emmy awards organisers the Television Academy after they asked which of the best actor or actress categories the Billions star would prefer to be included in.

“I’d like to know if in your eyes ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ denote anatomy or identity and why it is necessary to denote either in the first place?” Dillon wrote. In response, the Academy said that Dillon could apply to whichever category they “more closely identifies as”. Dillon opted for actor, due to its widespread use as a gender-neutral term.

Many major awards ceremonies, including the Oscars, Emmys and Baftas, still feature separate categories for men and women, though some have gone gender-neutral in recent years. In 2012 the Grammys eliminated the distinction between male and female performers, instead opting for categories such as best pop vocal performance. The National Television Awards dispensed with gendered categories in 2008, then reverted back to male and female awards in 2012 and 2013, before returning to gender-neutral categories in the years since.

Speaking to New York magazine about the decision to dispense with gendered categories, MTV president Chris McCarthy, said. “This audience actually doesn’t see male-female dividing lines, so we said, ‘Let’s take that down.’”

But Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, a website that advocates for gender equality in film, said that the decision could do more harm than good.

“We are all for more inclusivity, especially for people who identify as non-binary, but we caution that this could severely effect female nominees in the future,” she told the Guardian. “We already know that women are severely underrepresented in many categories – only 20% of the non-acting Oscar nominees were women this year – and so if different awards events decide to remove gender identification from categories it is incumbent upon them to work even harder to make sure a full spectrum of people are included in the nominees as well as in the selection committees.”

Leading the way in nominations for the awards is satirical horror film Get Out, which has received seven, including movie of the year and best villain. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and TV dramas This Is Us and Stranger Things each have four nominations.