Women have Oscars taking notice
Nominations show signs of Hollywood’s tide turning
It was a better day for women in Hollywood on Tuesday after the Academy Awards nominations were announced and women’s names turned up in categories where they have been rarely seen, such as best director and best cinematographer.
Progress? Maybe. It was at least a hopeful sign to those pushing for more equality for women in an industry staggering under multiple scandals throwing harsh light on how women are treated unfairly in opportunities, paychecks and personal safety.
Being nominated for an Oscar is no guarantee of winning, but at least women are in the pool, a crucial step given the near-shutout in important categories dating back decades and as recently as the Golden Globes last month.
The big name and big news was Greta Gerwig, who was nominated for best original screenplay and for best director for Lady Bird, which also was nominated for best picture.
And a first: Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated for cinematography for her painterly photography in Mudbound, the Netflix tale that focuses on the post-World War II era in the Deep South. Her competitors are all men: Roger Deakins for Blade
Runner 2024, Bruno Delbonnel for Darkest Hour, Hoyte van Hoytema for Dunkirk and Dan Laustsen for The Shape of Water.
There were other positive signs in the nominations: In the original screenplay category, two other women were nominated besides Gerwig: Emily V. Gordon for her work with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani, in The Big
Sick and Vanessa Taylor for her work with Guillermo del Toro in The Shape
of Water, which also was nominated for best picture.
And the animated-feature category included three women: Nora Twomey for her work with Anthony Lee in The
Breadwinner, Darla K. Anderson for her work with Lee Unkrich in Coco, and Dorota Kobiela for her work with Hugh Welchman and Ivan Mactaggart in Loving Vincent.
Mary J. Blige was a twofer nominee: The nine-time Grammy winner earned her first acting Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress for Mudbound. She also was nominated, with Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson, for best original song, Mighty River.
The academy was eager to stress what it considers good signs, issuing a fact sheet that pointed out Lady Bird is the 13th film directed by a woman to be nominated for best picture and the fourth film written and directed solely by women to be nominated for best picture and writing.
On the other hand, the only other woman thought to have had a chance in the best-director category, Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman, missed out in the nominations. And African-American filmmaker Dee Rees failed to score a nomination for best picture or director for Mudbound.
Actress Amber Tamblyn, for one, wasn’t satisfied.
“The Oscar nominations are not just a problem of exclusion. This is a problem of representation. There needs to be more films written and directed by women and women of color, PERIOD,” she said in a series of tweets.
The 2018 Oscar nominations come as Hollywood — and American culture at large — are grappling with multiple calls for change in the lack of parity for women behind the cameras and in what women are paid compared with men. Most of all, women in the entertainment industry have reached the boiling point, expressed in the explosive outrage of the Me Too and Time’s Up movements against sexual harassment and abuse of women, believed to be a direct result of their paucity of power in Hollywood.
Not one woman was nominated for best director at the Golden Globes last month — again. In the history of the Academy Awards, only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won a bestdirector Oscar, for the Iraq War thriller
The Hurt Locker in 2010. Only three other women have ever been nominated in the best-director category: Lina Wertmüller of Italy in 1977 for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion of New Zealand for The Piano in 1994, and American Sofia Coppola for Lost in
Translation in 2004 (although she did win the Oscar for best original screenplay for the film that year).
Melissa Silverstein, founder and publisher of the blog Women and Hollywood, has long argued that the entertainment industry has to do better when it comes to hiring women in general and women of color in particular. So she was celebrating on Twitter Tuesday.
“Still feeling the impact of the Greta Gerwig nomination for a movie about a teen girl. When Bigelow was nominated and won it was a war movie. This is a movie about a girl being seen for who she is. That matters.”
More generally, Silverstein is so fed up with women’s place in the moviemaking industry that she favors getting tough on Hollywood, because nothing else has worked.
“It is beyond time for quotas,” she posted in a tweet Jan. 4. “Every institution across the board must make a public commitment to increasing women and we must hold them to it.
“Everyone should be raging. Our cultural stories are being hijacked.”