INTO OSCAR’S SPOTLIGHT
Female directors appear ready to topple ignoble Academy Award stat
Four: A glaring number NEW YORK in Academy Awards history. That’s how many women have been nominated for best director in the awards’ 89 years of existence. Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker in 2010, is the only woman to win.
“It really bums me out,” says Greta Gerwig, whose solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, opened recently. “Every year I see the list of people who are in the running for best director. Kathryn Bigelow got in — that’s one. Every year they nominate five guys. Every year. And four women have been nominated in the history of the Academy Awards. That’s ridiculous.”
This year, the nominations may be different — or, at least, it will be especially confounding if they aren’t.
Gerwig’s coming-of-age tale Lady Bird is among the most acclaimed films of the year. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was a hit with audiences and critics. Next week, Dee Rees releases her Sundance Film Festival hit, the Mississippi period drama Mudbound. It’s early to handicap March’s Academy Awards, but each — particularly Gerwig and Lady Bird — is considered a possible nominee for best picture and best director.
While Hollywood has been overrun with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the harsh light it has thrown on gender imbalance in the industry, movie screens have been aglow with ambitious films by female directors beating the odds stacked against them.
Oscar nominations won’t change the dominant maleness of the industry, where green-lighting executives, top agents and Academy members (despite recent efforts to reshape membership) remain overwhelmingly male. The discrepancy is particularly pronounced behind the camera, where women comprised only seven per cent of directors on the 250 highest-grossing domestic releases in 2016, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. That’s two percentage points less than in 1998.
But as the #OscarsSoWhite protest has shown, the Academy Awards can throw a spotlight on wider industry inequality.
“The severe gender imbalance strikes me as a source of considerable potential embarrassment for the academy,” said Martha Lauzen, author of the San Diego State study. “Typically, a few highprofile individuals can skew our perceptions about how members of a certain group are faring but result in little, if any, substantial change. This year could prove to be unique in that nerves regarding this issue are raw.”
Long before hundreds of women began coming forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Weinstein, director James Toback, producer Brett Ratner and many others, 2017 has been a movie year in many ways defined by female filmmakers. Bigelow, who thought her Oscar win would lead to some industry change, released her race riot docu-drama Detroit. Sofia Coppola, one of the four best director nominees (Lina Wertmuller and Jane Campion are the others), became just the second woman to win the directing prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her Civil War drama The Beguiled.
Other acclaimed female-directed films include Cannes selection The Rider by Chloe Zhao, Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian genocide drama First They Killed My Father (Cambodia’s Oscar submission), Rebecca Miller’s documentary of her father playwright Arthur Miller, and Angela Robinson’s Wonder Woman origin story Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Notably, Detroit and Professor Marston were released by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, one of Hollywood’s few female-led production companies.
Robinson, noting the record-setting box office for Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (its US$821.8 million worldwide gross is the most for a female-directed movie), says change is in the air.
“I do feel like there’s some give,” says Robinson. “I do feel that there is a kind of energy and a galvanizing anger happening that’s demanding that there be more representation of voices.”