January 23, 2018--The Statuette Please . . .

At last night's Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony, after an evening of political correctness by an all female corps of presenters and thank-you speeches by winners, when receiving SAG's lifetime achievement award, Morgan Freeman commented about the statuette given to recipients--

"I wasn't going to do this," Freeman said at the end of his remarks, "I'm going to tell you what's wrong with this statue. It works from the back; but from the front it's gender-specific."

The audience laughed and cheered.

The SAG statuette, known as "The Actor," depicts a nude male figure holding two masks--one of comedy, the other of tragedy.

The gender specificness, however, isn't all that specific. The male genitalia is more a PG-13 sort of a lump than anything full-frontal R-rated.

Not all that unlike the Oscar whose maleness is less apparent since all the specifics appear to have been surgically removed. He does, though, hold a nearly body-length Crusader sword that also serves as a fig leaf. The symbolism speaks for itself.

The Golden Globe statuette, on the other hand, is totally non-gendered. Unless one wants to view the spherical "globe" as somehow female.

But there is a simple solution when it comes to Oscar and The Actor--give winners a choice of statues.

There should be male and female versions. And while we're at it, African American as well as Caucasian ones. Maybe even an Asian  choice. Clothed and unclothed. And thinking ahead to the possibility of a Muslim winner, the Islamic female statuette should of course veiled. On the other hand that won't work since Muslims do not permit paintings and sculpture that represent humans.

So maybe my solution isn't so simple after all.

Left to right: Oscar, Golden Globe, "The Actor"