WS More or Less: Women, the Oscars and the Bechdel Test
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2018
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are Hollywood films ignoring women? As this is the 90th year of the Academy Awards - we find out how many ‘Best Picture’ winners pass the Bechdel Test. This is a light-hearted way of challenging whether a film meets a low standard of female representation. They have to fulfil three criteria: are there at least two named female characters in the cast? Do those two women speak to each other? And do they have a conversation about something other than a man? In collaboration with the BBC’s 100 Women team, we reveal the answer but also look at what other ways we could be assessing representation in film.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:47.0 | We like to take the world and shine a statistical spotlight onto it. |
| 0:51.0 | Over the past year, Hollywood has been in the news for negative |
| 0:55.0 | reasons. The Hollywood sex scandal deepens another actress comes forward claiming |
| 1:00.5 | she was raped by film producer Harvey Weinstein. |
| 1:03.5 | Hollywood female stars are angry. |
| 1:05.9 | It's not just sex scandals. |
| 1:07.6 | A year ago we also covered their dismay at pay, |
| 1:10.7 | where we pointed out that one of the reasons actresses earn less in Hollywood |
| 1:14.7 | is because there are just fewer roles for women. This week it's the 90th year of the |
| 1:20.0 | Royal Academy Awards and so we thought we'd ask how visible are women in film. |
| 1:27.3 | To do this more or less has teamed up with a few others. So I'm Amelia, I'm Sarah and I'm Georgina. They're from a BBC team called 100 |
| 1:38.9 | women. So we work with women's bloggers around the world service to tell the stories of women and every year we release a list of 100 inspirational women that you should know about. |
| 1:52.0 | We decided to look back at 89 years worth of films that |
| 1:56.0 | won best picture and ask do they pass the Bechtel test? What is that I hear some of you say? Well back in 1985 a cartoonist called |
| 2:06.4 | Allison Beckdale poked fun at the fact that so few films had satisfying female |
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