Cate Blanchett said the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” in Hollywood, speaking Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival.In a wide-ranging staged conversation, Blanchett lamented that the tide of #MeToo has been turned in Hollywood, where she has been outspoken about gender equality.
Cate Blanchett on #MeToo movement in Hollywood
“It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting,” said Blanchett.“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me,” Blanchett said. “And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying MeToo. Why does that get shut down?”As per Variety, she added, “What [the movement] revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem.”
Cate Blanchett on men dominating film sets
In 2018, when she was president of the jury in Cannes, Blanchett took part in a red-carpet protest. She and 81 other women appeared on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, symbolically representing the number of female director who were selected for Cannes’ competition lineup. Over the same period, 1,866 male directors had been selected.Noting the imbalance of power between men and women in the film industry continues to this day, she said, “I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day. There’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning.“I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same,’ she said. “You just have to brace yourself slightly, and I’m used to that, but it just gets boring for everybody when you walk into a homogeneous workplace.”At the time of the women’s march, Cannes organizers were being criticized for failing to do more to publicly acknowledge the #MeToo and Time’s Up initiatives. “Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of the industry says otherwise,” Blanchett was quoted saying.
