'Best Actor'?

And speaking of plural language, there was the news a few days ago that Emma Watson had won MTV's new-fangled genderless acting award. 'Best Actor' and 'Best Actress' categories were dispensed with and replaced with one single category called, wait for it... 'Best Actor'. Hilariously, this progressive destruction of  'Best Actress' enshrines the allegedly sexist masculine plural, you know the one that oppressively encompasses the feminine as well.  There is no reason to give Emma Watson a 'Best' award for acting under any category, and especially not for "Beauty and the Beast", but the political idea MTV was presumably serving is just wrong. We don't call female doctors doctoresses or female lawyers lawyeresses because whether the doctor or lawyer is male or female makes no difference to the work they do. Acting, on the other hand, is an activity that is based entirely on the use of the person: body, appearance, voice, past experience, inner resources, everything. Whether that person is male or female is precisely the starting point of the activity, however much one would wish this reality away politically. Abolishing the category of 'actress' is in fact detrimental to all women who try to earn their living by acting because it fails to recognise the most basic quality they are bringing to their work.