Want To Win an Oscar? Play a Wife or Criminal
LatestOver at Fusion, they have a breakdown of all the fictional professions that have garnered a Best Actor and Best Actress win. They found that while 16% of women have won for playing wives, 13% of men have won for playing criminals.
Here’s the full breakdown:
| Best Actress | Best Actor |
|---|---|
| 1. Wife (16%) | 1. Criminal (13%) |
| 2. Entertainer (14%) | 2. Military (11%) |
| 4. Widow (11%) | 3. Entertainer (9%) |
| 4. Blue Collar (11%) | 5. Arts and Literature (8%) |
| 5. Socialite/Heiress (8%) | 5. Royalty/Nobility (8%) |
Apparently number six on the Best Actress list is the world’s oldest profession: prostitute.
Via Fusion:
At the Oscars, women have been consistently rewarded for portraying characters who conform to traditional gender roles. And when they do work outside the home, they’re often limited to blue collar jobs like waitress and housekeeper.
Tonight’s nominees for both Best Actor and Best Actress follow that trend.
The 2015 nominees for Best Actor can pretty accurately described as: Geniuses, a criminal, and a dude with a gun. Felicity Jones plays a long-suffering wife and Rosamund Pike plays a wife less willing to suffer; and both Marion Cotillard and Reese Witherspoon play blue collar women. The stand out is Julianne Moore’s Still Alice, in which she plays a college professor.
Image via Getty.