Hindustan Times (Patna) - Hindustan Times (Patna) - Live
Hollywood is built on myth that genius is white men’s domain, says Smriti
In a year when Greta Gerwig (Little Women) and Lulu Wang (The Farewell) were expected to be front-runners for the best director category at major Hollywood award shows, women were snubbed, once again, raising questions about inclusivity and diversity.
Be it the Golden Globes, Bafta, the Directors Guild
Awards (DGA), or the Oscars, the lack of women nominees in the line-up for 2020 has come into focus.
Indian-American Smriti Mundhra, who along with Sami Khan, is nominated in the Documentary (Short Subject) category at the Oscars for St Louis Superman, says the lack of female directing nominees comes as no surprise.
She tells us, “Hollywood is built on a myth that genius is the domain of white men. Awards recognition is a reflection of systemic issues that go all the way back to who gets money to make films and improve their craft, who evaluates those films once they’re done (majority of film critics are white men), on whom a studio decides to spend their ‘awards campaign budget’, who votes for awards...”
Smriti adds that this is a “domino effect that results in awards going to white men, which leads to more opportunities for white men, which leads to more awards for white men, which perpetuates this idea that somehow white men just inherently make better art”.
Soon after this year’s Oscar nomination line-up came out, Smriti had taken to Twitter to share how she had turned to documentaries when she couldn’t get her feature film financed even after five years.
Interestingly, the short documentary subject category has come into its own over the years at the Oscars. Even Guneet Monga’s Period. End of Sentence won in the same category last year.
Smriti says this category has gone from being “small potatoes for decades to very big potatoes in the last few years”. She feels streaming platforms may have driven the change, and adds, “A great short documentary is like a great short story. It takes a lot less time to write than a novel.”