BU Today feature: Actor Geena Davis to Receive Honorary Oscar Sunday Night
In 2004, actor Geena Davis started a nonprofit to combat the deep gender inequality she was seeing in children’s films. Up until then, she got a cold response from people in the industry whenever she brought it up.
“Nobody believed what I was saying,” says Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99). “People were completely blind to the problem.”
Not anymore. The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have pushed gender equality center stage and proven the need for the kind of cutting-edge research that the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media has been doing for a decade and a half. The institute’s work is data-driven, using technology and research to quantify the ways women and girls are underrepresented in film. Its research has found that male lead roles have outnumbered female lead roles by two-to-one in the last decade, and that white lead roles outnumber those of people of color four-to-one. The numbers don’t lie, Davis says, and they gave the actor—who by 2004 already had an Academy Award and a significant platform—a way to talk about what others weren’t.
Her work will be honored on Sunday during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 11th annual Governors Awards, where Davis will be presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award given to a person “whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry.” She will be in good company: previous recipients include Paul Newman, Oprah Winfrey, and Angelina Jolie.