OK If I Run for Male Columnist of the Year?

Friday morning, nomination ballots were sent out for the 71st Academy Awards. (A little r in a circle here, to indicate “registered trademark,” because the academy is really fussy.)

Qualified voters will be marking their ballots to choose candidates for Oscars--a little r here too--in categories such as best picture, best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and actress, best director and best song sung by Celine Dion that has nothing to do with the movie.

OK, I made up that last one.

Before everybody from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences votes, I do have a couple of questions to ask:

1. Why are there arts AND sciences?

What makes something from a work of art a science? If a thing is used in art, isn’t it art? You wouldn’t honor painters and include a category for best paint. If sound or special effects are used in films, they are arts, not sciences. Rename the academy!

Now my more pertinent question:

2. Why are there actors AND actresses?

I still don’t understand why they have one best directing award, but two best acting and two best supporting acting awards.

Isn’t acting acting?

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Every time I am told that men and women are meant to be treated equally, I see someplace else where they still aren’t treated equally.

The women at Wimbledon who play tennis wish to receive the same prize money as the men. They feel they deserve it. A Wimbledon champion is a Wimbledon champion.

However: (a) They do not play against the men, and (b) they play a maximum of three sets per match, as opposed to the men’s five. Men’s matches often last hours longer.

OK, you say--tennis involves physical strength. Men and women are not created equally here.

I’ll grant you that, even though I believe 90% of the female population could kick my butt.

My question is still this:

What’s it got to do with acting?

If, say, Gwyneth Paltrow gives a good performance and Nick Nolte gives a good performance, what makes them different? Their biology? How come a Martha Coolidge has to compete directly against a Martin Scorsese for the best directing job by anyone in a given year, but there’s no such award as best performance?

We don’t hold a separate election for male and female senator. We don’t give out a Nobel Peace Prize, women’s division.

The sound men in Oscar competition have the same job as the sound women. They’re just sound people.

“Best performance by an actress.”

Why?

Because only women can play women and men men?

What about the Academy Awards for 1983, when the best supporting actress award went to Linda Hunt of “The Year of Living Dangerously,” who played a man?

What made that role gender-specific? The part didn’t call for a woman to play a man. This wasn’t a film like “Tootsie,” in which an actor pretended to be an actress, or “The Crying Game,” in which a woman turned out to be a man (both nominated performances).

Hunt had no secret surprise. She was just hired to play a part.

One of her, uh, fellow nominees that year was Amy Irving, for “Yentl,” in which she co-starred with Barbra Streisand, a woman playing a girl pretending to be a boy.

Streisand wasn’t nominated. Otherwise, both she and Hunt could have walked out that year with Oscars for best actress in a part that could have been played by an actor.

Come to think of it, why is someone even called an actress? If she flies a plane, is she a pilotess?

I’ll have to ask somebody at TWA or Delta before next year’s best aviator and aviatrix awards.

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Classifying things is never easy.

I have a friend, an academy voter, who wants a separate Oscar category for comedy, just as the Golden Globes have. That’s fine, but how can you tell a comedy from a drama? Which one was “Armageddon?” I’ve seen circuses that didn’t have that many clowns.

One of the best films I saw in 1998 was Warren Beatty’s “Bulworth,” but I couldn’t swear it was a comedy or a drama.

As for this “supporting” business . . .

I don’t get it. For example, I just saw “A Simple Plan,” for which Billy Bob Thornton is (justifiably) being mentioned as an Oscar candidate. But I keep reading that it’ll be for best supporting actor. Billy Bob was in that picture from start to finish. Everybody else supported him.

Maybe he was nominated that way by the film’s producer. Or produceress.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: [email protected]