Cate Blanchett joined Cannes moderator Didier Allouch for a chat on the 2026 version of the movie pageant and lamented how the #MeToo motion “got killed very quickly.” The 2-time Oscar winner notably served as Cannes jury president in 2018 on the peak of #MeToo and led a women’s march the place she held fingers with Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux, Ava DuVernay, Agnès Varda and extra as they walked up the steps of the Palais des Festivals.
“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me, and the so-called average woman on the street is saying #MeToo. Why does that get shut down?” Blanchett requested. “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.”
Blanchett famous that the imbalance of energy between women and men within the movie trade continues to today.
“I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day, and it is still, you know… there’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” the actor mentioned. “I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same. 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. I think it has an effect on the work.”
Julianne Moore additionally spoke up at Cannes in regards to the gender disparity that continues on movie units. Throughout her Kering Ladies in Movement Speak, the “Still Alice” Oscar winner mentioned that “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC.”
“It’s when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and we were both devastated. And I said, ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here,’” Moore added. “I’ve certainly seen more gender representation in crews. It was unusual when I was coming up to see women on a crew.”
On the 2018 Cannes girls’s march, Blanchett was one in all 82 girls who protested. The actor defined that quantity was a reference to the quantity of feminine administrators who had competed at Cannes up till that time within the pageant’s historical past, in comparison with the 1,866 male administrators over the identical interval.
“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of the industry says otherwise,” Blanchett mentioned on the time. “As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress. We are writers, producers, directors, actresses, cinematographers, talent agents, editors, distributors, sales agents and all involved in the cinematic arts.”
On the time of the ladies’s march, Cannes organizers have been being criticized for failing to do extra to publicly acknowledge the #MeToo and Time’s Up initiatives.
