Originally published in Able News.

Friends and colleagues were recently quoted in Patrick Hosken’s March 11 CITY Magazine article, “The Oscars love disability stories, but it’s complicated.” This got me thinking.

Seems like almost every awards season, disability shows up on screen dressed for the occasion. The music swells, the camera lingers, and audiences are expected to admire the struggle, the sacrifice, the sheer effort of it all.

But are we awarding authenticity, or rewarding the flex?

It’s an important distinction.

I’ve spent over two decades making the case that Hollywood has never fully ignored disability. Not entirely. Through showcases on the history and evolution of disability in film with friends and colleagues at Turner Classic Movies, and now in my role as Director of Engagement for ReelAbilities International, I’ve said publicly what bears repeating: the love Hollywood shows disability is real, but conditional.

Too often, disability is treated as cinematic emotional shorthand. A way to telegraph seriousness without going through the trouble of earning it firsthand. Audiences and critics alike have been conditioned to feel reverence, heartbreak, admiration, maybe even gratitude for having witnessed something so… powerful.

But powerful for whom?

When it comes to disability, what awards culture loves is visible labor. Audiences marvel at an actor’s transformation. Clamor at the commitment. Applaud the act of “disappearing” into disability as if effort equals truth.

SPOILER ALERT: It doesn’t.

Research is not the same as reality. And effort, however Herculean, is not authentic by default.

We’ve seen this time and again. Disability stories that tend to trend are, more often than not, tailored toward nondisabled comfort. A disabled character may be central to the plot, but only if they serve someone else’s emotional journey.

Rarely is disability afforded the full, contradictory texture experienced in ordinary life. Seldom do we get disability presented through the prism of atmosphere, attitude, politics, humor, culture, or complexity without requiring it to deliver some larger moral message.

As we know, in real life, disability is more than a two-hour lesson in courage with a string section soundtrack. To folks livin’ it, disability is more about logistics and language. Bureaucracy and improvisation. Access and denial. Community and conflict. It comes with annoyance, adaptation, intimacy, exhaustion, creativity, routine, and desire baked in, fueled by a fierceness forged in frustration. It is often unresolved.

By contrast, awards culture loves a simple story arc. A transformation. A predictable payoff. Disability resists easy answers like these by forcing us to ask often uncomfortable, inconvenient questions about dependence, design, autonomy, and who gets access.

This goes beyond casting, though who plays what role certainly matters. It also means recognizing the value of disabled people cast in roles where disability is simply present and acknowledged, but not necessarily the point, part of the fabric of the story being told rather than its focal point or erased altogether. Put simply, disabled actors will always play disabled characters, whether disability is foregrounded in the story or simply woven into its fabric. At the core, though, all roads lead back to authorship. Who shapes the story from the beginning? Who gets to decide what disability means in a scene, a character, a narrative, and in the world being depicted or created?

Those decisions are made in development meetings and first drafts. In greenlights and rewrites. In assumptions about what audiences will embrace and studios will support.

What would actual progress look like? More disabled creatives shaping stories at every level. Not symbolically. Not as insurance against controversy. Present from the outset: in the writing, directing, editing, producing, programming, and decision-making. Where tone is set and meaning is made.

Thankfully, this is not just theoretical.

ReelAbilities’ 18th annual festival takes place across New York City and New Jersey from April 23 through 30, with our fifth Industry Summit on April 27 and 28 as a hybrid gathering in New York and online. All intended and designed to push the conversation past symbolism toward substantive improvements in who gets hired, funded, mentored, commissioned, distributed, accommodated, and applauded.

That’s more than programming. It’s a guiding philosophy. And practice.

At ReelAbilities, we do disability differently by emphasizing the role it plays in culture, craft, and community. We respect disability as a creative force that makes the work we showcase sharper, stranger, bolder, more reflective of reality, and a catalyst for imagining what could and should be in the worlds we create, and ultimately live in.

Join us, won’t you?