Frances McDormand stands with all female nominees (literally) during Best Actress acceptance speech
Frances McDormand actually looked visibly upset when her name was called for the Best Actress award at tonight’s Oscars, but luckily she managed to get over her shock rather quickly because, as she said, she had some stuff to say. McDormand did the usual thanks and call-outs, but then she put her Oscar down and called for all of the night’s female nominees—all of them, in every category—to stand for a moment. She called for all of the men in the industry to set up meetings with the women in attendance to talk, and then she ended her speech with two words: “inclusion rider.”
As our own Ignatiy Vishnevetsky explained in The A.V. Club’s live blog:
A rider is an addition to a contract—a revision that is signed as a separate document so that the whole doesn’t have to be rewritten from scratch. A call for “inclusion riders,” then, is a call for stars and other power players to demand more gender-balanced creative teams (or more equal pay) as a condition of their contracts.
Watch the whole video below: