Feb. 23--Meryl Streep's reaction was my favorite part of Patricia Arquette's Oscars speech.
After thanking her family and all the usual suspects, Arquette, who won best supporting actress for her role in "Boyhood," addressed a wider audience.
"To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation," she began. "We have fought for everybody else's equal rights. It's our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America."
Cameras panning the audience caught an enthusiastic Streep clapping emphatically and saying, "Yes! Yes!"
In a town obsessed with celebrity catfights -- real and imagined -- it was a beautiful moment.
It was also instructive.
Streep, at 65, has been watching Hollywood (and the United States) inch closer to gender equality for decades -- a topic she's happy to speak on. As The New Yorker noted last year, Streep frequently imbues her interviews and speeches with a feminist critique.
"As the doyenne of American film acting," the magazine's Michael Schulman wrote, "Streep has used her position to call attention to gender imbalance in the movies, whether by extolling her colleagues ('I am so in awe of the work of the women this year') or by attributing her own range of roles to the fact that 'there are more women in decision-making positions who are able to greenlight movies.'"
At 46, Arquette is hardly new to the struggle. And she's also known for leading with her principles. (Watch her tell Ryan Seacrest pre-ceremony that she skipped a manicure Sunday to work on a charity she's launching to promote ecological sanitation around the world.)
But too often our own feminist critique -- the conversation this country is having about feminism -- gets stuck on how third-wave feminists (those who came to the movement in the '90s or later) mesh with their predecessors.
Too often very real issues get lost in the muddled conflict over who's a real feminist and what the movement means for women with decades (and vastly different life experiences) dividing them.
Arquette's speech -- and Streep's reaction -- remind us what it means: Humans standing up, together, to advocate for a more equal world.
As Vox notes, the gender pay gap in Hollywood is as real as anywhere else.
"The top 10 highest-paid actors from 2013 made a collective $465 million," the site reports. "The top 10 highest-paid actresses made $181 million. The highest-paid actress, Angelina Jolie with $33 million, made the same amount of money as the ninth and 10th highest-paid men, Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington."
Arquette had a podium and an audience Sunday that few of us will ever experience. Streep's applause resonates louder than most people's. It was lovely to witness the coming together of those two realities -- for the betterment of all of us.
hstevens@tribpub.com
