A British menswear brand has created a new iconic design for the Oscars statue to help champion diversity in body shape and promote body confidence.
Dubbed, The Real Leading Man Award; the statue has been created as a direct campaign to challenge the current lack of diversity at the Oscars, indicating that the widely debated problem lies not purely in the lack of diversity of colour represented in this year’s Oscars, but predominantly around the absence of diversity in body size and shape.
Menswear retailer, Jacamo, has recreated the famous gold award in response to the current unrealistic image of the typical male body form, embodied nowhere more powerfully than in Hollywood.
The decision to campaign for a remodelled Oscar award was driven by a recent study commissioned by the size-specialist retailer, which revealed how nearly a fifth (16%) of men claim that watching TV & films, starring men with bodies they feel are unachievable, has affected their own body confidence.
The new statuette shows a more realistic shape by representing the actual size of the average UK male (5ft 9inch with a 37inch waist and 42inch chest). It has been introduced to encourage blokes to banish their own insecurities around body image confidence by saluting the Real Man and celebrating diversity.
With the current gold statuette portraying a tall, defined figure and slender waist, a real life interpretation of this would produce a fairly unobtainable six foot tall man with a 33 inch waist, far removed from the idea of the Real Man, for which Jacamo explicitly campaign for.
Jenni Bamford from Jacamo, which caters for men in sizes from small to 5XL, comments: “Following the worrying results highlighted in our recent research, we felt very strongly that after 87 years it was more important than ever that the Oscars celebrated diversity in body size and we were determined to further help blokes with their own body confidence concerns.
“We’ve created our Real Leading Man Award to reflect this, with its now more convincing figure, inspired by the size of the average UK male, supporting our commitment to recognise more realistic looking men and our refusal to adopt the typical one size fits all approach in our retailing style.”
During this award season, there is even more of a spotlight on Tinseltown and of course the Oscars, which are widely recognised as the pinnacle of a film stars’ success.
Although there have indeed been past candidates who have represented some degree of body size diversity in the Oscars, previous winner Eddie Redmayne admitted to losing 2 stone for his recent role in the Danish Girl and Matthew McConaughey reportedly lost over 3 stone for his winning role as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club for example, there is still a long way to go in achieving diversity across the board.
Legend has it that the trophy depicts a Crusader Knight, modelled by Mexican actor Emilio Fernández in 1928, who was said to have had the ‘perfect physique’ to achieve the sculptor’s vision of the award.
-ENDS-
