{"id":523112,"date":"2026-03-06T19:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/523112\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T19:29:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:29:10","slug":"research-shows-older-women-are-winning-more-oscars-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/523112\/","title":{"rendered":"Research shows older women are winning more Oscars \u2013 here’s why"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most recent study<\/a> from Annenberg also found that from Hollywood’s top 100 films last year, there were only four women aged 45 plus who featured as a lead or co-lead, and one was a voice character in an animation: Ginnifer Goodwin in Zootopia 2. None of them were women of colour. By contrast, there were 31 men in the same age bracket who qualified as leads or co-leads in these movies, including actors such as Anthony Mackie, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Dwayne Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pedro Pascal and Tom Cruise.<\/p>\n

\u00a0“You can’t tell me that over this age on screen, there aren’t qualified female actors able to do [protagonist] roles,” Smith tells the BBC. “Really, this is discrimination. And I guarantee you, it’s also a finite group of women that are getting those opportunities to play those roles on screen,” she adds about the number of older actresses who might be considered able to carry a commercial, big budget film, as opposed to a more arthouse, “prestige” project.<\/p>\n

Older female screenwriters, according to Kaiden and The Writers Lab co-founder Nitza Wilon, are equally still under-represented in popular film-making. In data given to the BBC, their study found that out of 511 US feature films released during 2025, only 12% were written by women over the age of 40 (and only 20% were written by women overall).\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The distance between the Academy Awards versus reality is quite far,” Wilon says. “I don’t think we can use the Oscars as a reliable source of what’s really going on in the world. The Academy Awards is a spectacle. It’s considered to be entertainment, not news. I’m excited by Demi Moore being 62 when she was nominated for The Substance, but she’s also a woman who does not look her age. Hollywood is a bubble. It’s not normal.”<\/p>\n

\"SonySony Pictures ClassicsFernanda Torres is among a number of older actresses in non-English language films that have been nominated (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most recent study from Annenberg also found that from Hollywood’s top 100 films last year, there were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-523112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}