Male-driven dramas are Oscar-bait, female-driven dramas are Lifetime movies? Are male-driven melodramas given more weight than female-driven ones?

I'd like to toss out a random thought for discussion... I really liked The Descendants.  It's a very good drama with fine performances all-around.  It arguably deserves its status as an Oscar front-runner.  But let's discuss something for a moment.  If the film revolved around an aging woman who grapples with bonding with her daughters after her unfaithful husband goes into a coma, would we still be talking about its likely Oscar victories? Would it be considered an automatic Oscar contender or would it have to fight perceptions that it was a glorified Lifetime movie?  If the film centered not around George Clooney's husband/father, but rather Shailene Woodley's suffering older daughter, would the film still be considered 'prestigious' enough to be crowned an Oscar contender before most critics/press even saw it?

Or would the film have been written off as a variation on something resembling Miley Cyrus's The Last Song?  And why is Woodley only now being touted as a fine actress, when she's been delivering solid starring work on The Secret Life of the American Teenager for several seasons now?  The same phenomena applies to Blake Lively, who gave a fine debut performance in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, as well as a solid supporting performance in the Robin Wright vehicle, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.  But, even ignoring her starring work on several seasons of Gossip Girl, it was only after she played a strung-out junkie to fill out the virgin/whore dynamic of Ben Affleck's The Town that pundits and critics started crowing about her acting.  Am I right to believe that male-driven dramas are automatically given more weight and credibility than female-driven ones?  Would Something Borrowed, arguably not a good movie, have been written off as a bad romantic comedy (it's not a comedy) or its protagonists so swiftly condemned as spawns-of-Satan if they were men undergoing the same dramatic arc?  Would I Don't Know How She Does It? been so absurdly written off as a variation on Sex and the City (it's not...) if it had been a dramedy about the struggles of a working father trying to be a provider and an active parent?  Would Bridesmaids be (deservedly) in the Best Picture Oscar race if it weren't written off in many circles as 'The Hangover for Girls'?  I think we all know the answers.

Scott Mendelson