Mar 1, 2019 - CAPTAIN MARVEL star Brie Larson has spoken out on the recent bizarre furore around her comments on diversity.
Is committed to making the press tour for “” as inclusive as possible. For her recent interview with, the Oscar-winning actress handpicked Keah Brown to be her interviewer. Brown called the designation the “biggest opportunity” she’s had in her career and noted that “nobody usually wants to take a chance on a disabled journalist.” By becoming more active in determining her press opportunities, Larson is hoping to heighten inclusive voices.“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male,” Larson said when asked about her reasons for choosing Brown as her interviewer.
“So, I spoke to Dr. Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that. Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.
After speaking with you, the film critic Valerie Complex and a few other women of color, it sounded like across the board they weren’t getting the same opportunities as others. When I talked to the facilities that weren’t providing it, they all had different excuses.”. Larson’s celebrity is about to hit new heights with the release of “Captain Marvel,” the first solo outing for a female superhero in the decades-old Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The actress said the role has given her an opportunity to begin working on solutions to Hollywood’s gender parity.“I want to go out of my way to connect the dots,” Larson said. “It just took me using the power that I’ve been given now as Captain Marvel. The role comes with all these privileges and powers that make me feel uncomfortable because I don’t really need themIt’s a by-product of the profession and a sign of the times. But any uncomfortableness I feel is balanced by the knowledge that it gives me the ability to advocate for myself and others.”Larson made last year for calling out the gender imbalance within the film criticism world. While accepting an award at the Crystal + Lucy Awards, Larson called the lack of equal representation among critics an “issue that’s been bubbling.”“Am I saying I hate white dudes?” Larson said. “No, I’m not but if you make the movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie and review your movie.”“Captain Marvel” opens in theaters nationwide March 8.Sign Up.
Star of the upcoming Captain Marvel, has always seemed like a good egg. Since securing grade-A status after winning an Oscar for Room, she has worked for survivors of sexual assault and has become an active force in the Times Up movement.Now she’s making efforts to increase diversity in the press pool.“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male,” she said.With this in mind, Larson personally selected – a woman of colour with cerebral palsy – as her interviewer for a feature. Brown noted that: “Nobody usually wants to take a chance on a disabled journalist.”Larson made a rigorous attempt to confirm that her eyes weren’t deceiving her.
There really did seem to be a bias towards the male and the pale.“I spoke to Dr at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that,” she said. “Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.”It will be interesting to see what effect she can have on the make-up of the busy junkets.
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Such operations function on the same scale as the D-Day landings. Several floors of a luxury hotel are given over to videographers, make-up people, caterers, holding rooms and even space for the odd print journalist. Longer print interviews tend to go to older journalists.Then again, a female-oriented magazine such as Marie Claire will usually send a woman for such a job.
(A quick, unscientific search on the magazine’s website found women writing the first 10 interviews that appeared.)There is almost certainly a bias towards men in those interviews carried out for big serious newspapers. Larson is quite correct to point out that journalists with disabilities are conspicuous by their absence in all categories.As Larson has noted before, a larger bias occurs in the area of film criticism. Last year she caused some commotion by implying that the mixed reviews for Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time had something to do with the age and race of the reviewers.“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time,” Larson said. “It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of colour, biracial women, to teen women of colour.”As a few veteran female critics politely pointed out, maniacs on the internet have long been telling them that they shouldn’t be reviewing comic-book films because they “weren’t made for them”.But Larson’s more general point is undeniable. A terrifying survey last year confirmed that around 78 percent of film criticism was by men in the US (we politely note that it’s 50-50 in The Irish Times). The situation for racial minorities was no better.There are issues with Larson’s approach.
Most periodicals are wary of allowing an actor to demand a specific interviewer for a profile. Such arrangements do nothing to promote disinterested questioning.Her efforts to increase diversity are nonetheless welcome. “This could be my form of activism: doing a film that can play all over the world and be in more places than I can be physically,” she said of Captain Marvel.There are worse ways of flogging superheroes.