Television and film award shows are boring

I’m sick and tired of people acting like it’s no big deal that Chris Brown will be performing at the Grammys.

I’m frustrated that the mainstream media is covering this story like it’s any comeback story, like an exiled prince’s return to a former glory, like this is another political timeline — as though some rich and powerful old white men in the music business have not just issued an enormous ‘f**k you’ to every woman who has been, is or will be on the receiving end of domestic violence.

We should be furious.

Why aren’t we?

“We’re glad to have him back,” said executive producer Ken Ehrlich. “I think people deserve a second chance, you know. If you’ll note, he has not been on the Grammys for the past few years and it may have taken us a while to kind of get over the fact that we were the victim of what happened.”

but is nobody ever allowed a second chance?

I'm not sure how I feel about Brown returning. I mean, it goes without saying that what he did was despicable and disgusting but is nobody ever allowed a second chance?

You see, how we perform our gender matters....Each choice of gesture and facial expression, each piece of clothing we select or avoid, signifies a step towards or away from the traditional expectations of what a man or a woman should do. From how we sit on the subway to what we eat for dinner, all of our daily actions are coded with gendered meaning.

Because the movies magnify all those choices, they offer a wonderful laboratory for observing gender performance at work. And this year's Best Actress nominees all played parts that illuminate the continuum of gender in compelling and moving ways.

As [Glenn] Close plays him, Albert Nobbs is a quiet, retiring, soft-featured man. His occupation as a waiter in a hotel in the late 1800s requires that he hold his body erect and that his movements be economical and efficient, so that he can pass persuasively as a man and guard the secret of his sex.

Close's performance of Albert's masculinity in Nobbs is different from Janet McTeer's as Hubert Page, the housepainter whom Albert learns is also a woman living as a man. Page's masculinity is terse, marked by his solitary work. Page takes up space differently than Albert, moving through his world with larger gestures and freer movements. Part of the film's genius, in fact, is how it showcases these two very different women's performances of masculinity.

Consider the more extreme feminine end of the gender continuum, on which I would place Michelle Williams' portrait of the iconic 1950s movie star in My Week with Marilyn. Williams has described how she painstakingly learned and rehearsed Monroe's signature walk. Her movements were dictated by her tight dresses and provoked by an hourglass figure that seems unnatural to most women in the 21st century (except, perhaps, Christina Hendricks, whose signature shape lets her play another 1950s woman in the television series, Mad Men). Williams couldn't perform as Monroe just because they share female biology; she had to learn how to perform the star's distinct femininity.

Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander, the fierce computer hacker in director David Fincher's adaptation of the popular Stieg Larsson book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, falls at the middle of the gender continuum, where masculinity and femininity blur. Mara's makeup and costume hides Lisbeth's body under facial piercings, ripped t-shirts and baggy cargo pants. And in shots of her riding her motorcycle, Lisbeth wears a helmet with a shield that completely obscures her face -- she could be a man or woman, of any age or race, for that matter.

I usually like watching Meryl Streep, but I seriously hope that she doesn’t win an Oscar on Sunday for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. I couldn’t stand the thought of more people going to see such a dreadful piece of right-wing propaganda.  I actually paid money to see The Iron Lady, a new film that is ostensibly about the life of Thatcher (nicknamed “the milk snatcher” for ending free school milk). All I could think about during the torturous 100 minutes, was what great timing this film is for the Republicans. Just as they try to sell neoliberal ideology to an increasingly impoverished working class, here comes a movie that celebrates one of their most ardent proponents. From the reviews, I expected a sanitized version of Thatcher’s hideously destructive policies, but this was so sanitized that you would have thought that this poor, misunderstood woman was in fact the best thing that ever happened to Britain since Marmite.