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.
Progress? Maybe. It was at least a hopeful sign to those pushing for more equality for women in an industry staggering under multiple scandals over opportunities, paychecks and personal safety for women.
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 this month.
Greta Gerwig was nominated for best original screenplay and for best director for Lady Bird,
which was nominated for best picture.
Rachel Morrison is 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.
In the original-screenplay category, two 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 was nominated for best picture.
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 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, in the best-director category, Patty Jenkins of Wonder Woman missed out in the nominations. African-American filmmaker Dee Rees wasn’t nominated for best picture or director for Mudbound.
Actress Amber Tamblyn 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 came as Hollywood — and American culture at large — grappled with multiple calls for change in the lack of parity for women behind the cameras and in what women are paid compared with men. 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.
Not one woman was nominated for best director at the Golden Globes — again. In the history of the Academy Awards, only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has won a best-director Oscar, for the Iraq War thriller The Hurt Locker in 2010. Before that, only three other women had been nominated in the best-director category: Lina Wertmüller in 1977 for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1994 and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2004 (she won the Oscar for best original screenplay for the film that year).
Melissa Silverstein, founder 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. She celebrated 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.”
“It is beyond time for quotas,” she tweeted 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.”