“While the only officially gendered awards for the Oscars are for acting, it’s no secret the Academy historically has favored men when it comes to handing out statuettes. Between 1929 and 2026, women made up less than 18% of all nominees, according to a report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
If you exclude the acting nominees, women have been nominated for just under 13% of all awards in the nearly century since the awards began, said Stacy L. Smith, who founded the initiative in 2005 to track inequality in entertainment.
“This industry cannot change itself,” Smith said. “To create change, you really need to work with folks and bring them in.”
To better understand where gender disparity stands today, we analyzed who actually speaks in the 10 films up for what many consider to be the highest honor in film: best picture at this Sunday’s Academy Awards.
Why? Because gender disparity in dialogue tells us something about the kinds of films that get nominated for awards — or made in the first place — and whose stories tend to be institutionally valued.
We went into this analysis knowing that historically, films that contend for best picture have been dominated by stories driven by male characters. We analyzed the 10 nominated films of 2026 and also analyzed the 2025 nominees to determine the most recent patterns.
Our findings: Women characters spoke about a quarter of the words. That’s down from a third of words in last year’s nominated films.
“Whether we look at just who's on screen, and now when we look at how much they speak, your findings reiterate this real lack of inclusion for women and girls on screen,” Smith said.”
Posted by catievirtuesimp