THR, and Others, Want an Oscar Category for Intimacy Coordinators

The recent phenomenon of on-set “intimacy coordinators” has not been adopted by everyone. It really depends on the studio, directors, producers and/or actors involved.

If you’re unaware, Intimacy Coordinators review scripts, facilitate group discussions about sex scenes and meet individually with the actors. It’s all about clarifying the personal boundaries one may have for any given scene. They, more or less, turn into directors, for certain scenes.

In a THR piece, titled The Case for an Oscar for Best Intimacy Coordinator, “Challengers” the trade, intimacy coordinator Mam Smith, and “sex-positive” erotic filmmaker Erika Lust try to make the case for professional recognition of ICs, including nominations at the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmys:

“They just got casting included as a category,” she notes [the Academy announced in February that best casting will be introduced from 2026 onwards]. “How many years were people lobbying for that?… I think it would be great [for intimacy coordinators] to get recoginition. For that to happen, I think we have to change the equality in this industry.”

Smith adds: “I would love to see it happen. I do think we have a way to go before we can be acknowledged because we just haven’t been standardized. In that sense, I think it’s going to take a while.”

There has been a slight pushback on intimacy coordinators. Some of the names who have come out against the protocol include Gaspar Noe, Mia Hansen-Løve and Toni Collette. Hansen-Løve went as far as to call ICs the “virtue police.” Noe bluntly stated, “that doesn’t exist in France.” Whereas, Collette admits she tells them to “leave the set.”

Most recently, speaking to The Telegraph, Michael Douglas slammed ICs, saying they harm to the art of filmmaking, stifling the creative process by taking away control from directors.

It comes down to this: what’s helpful to one person might not always be helpful to the next. In the post-MeToo era, public discourse around consent has changed a lot of on-set behaviors. As film writer Eric Kohn noted last year, “everyone’s so focused about what they can or can’t ask people to do that they stop asking them to do much at all.”