The latest round of Oscar nominees reflects new reality in Hollywood.
OSCAR NOMINEES REFLECT NEW REALITY IN HOLLYWOOD
I love watching the Oscars and seeing everybody saying all that ‘it’s an honour just to be nominated’ rubbish. Then you see their faces when the split screen comes up as the winner is announced — the losers are all smiling through gritted teeth and looking as if they just swallowed half a pound of soor plooms.” - John Niven
Hurrah! For the second year r unning, t he Oscars won’t be so white. Sure, the nominations last Tuesday had some lamentable omissions — Dee Rees for best director, for one, along with her movie Mudbound. But one of its stars, Mary J. Blige, got two nominations, and Jordan Peele got three, with Get Out, his evisceration of smug white liberalism, landing on the best picture list.
To quote Tiffany Haddish, as she stumbled over the Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya’s name while announcing the nominees, Kallelujah!
Also, wahoo, the Oscars won’t be so male. Greta Gerwig became only the fifth woman to ever get a directing nomination, for Lady Bird, Rachel Morrison became the first female Oscarnominated cinematographer, for Mudbound, and four of the nine best picture finalists are about women.
But check out the list of nominated actresses. It’s hard to find an ingenue — to use a term long past its sell- by date — in the bunch. And by and large, the women these actresses portray onscreen are not “likable” in the traditional sense but instead wily, ferocious and unbowed.
Who out there wouldn’t want to follow Frances McDormand’s Mildred, from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, into battle? Or, for that matter, the tough mamas played by Allison Janney in I, Tonya and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird? At the very least, these are not women anyone would soon cross. Nor are Lesley Manville’s icy Cyril from Phantom Thread; Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding; the co- conspirator Octavia Spencer plays in The Shape of Water; Mary J. Blige’s sharecropper’s wife in Mudbound ( Blige was also nominated for best original song); or even Saoirse Ronan’s no- nonsense high schooler in Lady Bird.
This is quite a thing. Only a few years ago, the apparent truism that women had to be winsome or sympathetic to sell films was still holding strong.
But Oscar voters and critics went ape for the roster of fearsome female characters that were, at long last, included in this year’s nominated films. (Badass, a term that in my mind is overused to the point of cliché, certainly applies.)
Not that t here’s anything wrong with the parts that recent Oscar- winning actresses have played, be they harried mothers ( Boyhood), devoted wives ( The Danish Girl), washed- up socialites ( Blue Jasmine) or starryeyed Hollywood hopefuls (La La Land). But this year it was clear that the academy was pretty amped to hear women roar.
In these times of # MeToo, Time’s Up and women’s marches, this shouldn’t be a surprise, said Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a filmmaker and founder and chief executive of the Represent ation Project, a non- profit group that fights gender stereotypes.
“With this awards season, we are seeing proof that sexism only sells when it’s the only thing being offered,” Ms. Newsom wrote in an email.
She sees the presidency of Donald Trump as playing no small part in the nominees’ appeal. “When a man who is so openly misogynistic beats the first female candidate of a major party to become president, it’s an aha moment,” Newsom added.
With the exception of Steven Spielberg’s The Post, most of these films were long in the works, hatched while the prospects of a Trump presidency and the # MeToo movement seemed unforeseeable, impossibly distant or just plain impossible. The Post, which stars Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham (another mighty female character that earned Streep her 21st Oscar nod), was quickly made after the election. Certainly all of the films’ awards campaigns are trumpeting why they are so relevant now.
It could be coincidence that the other films just happened to come out in time for # MeToo. Martin McDonagh, the writer and director of Three Billboards, has said that he wrote a strong female lead because he had done so in his plays but had yet to in his films. Guillermo del Toro, who directed The Shape of Water, has a history of writing strong female characters, and has said he had wanted to make a human- amphibian love story for years. Greta Gerwig told Slate that she didn’t feel her script for Lady Bird was ready until 2015.
But chances are these movies, and the academy’s receptivity to them, are in part products of a shift that began when criticism of Hollywood’s white, male homogeneity became impossible to ignore. ( Recall that in 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union called on government agencies to investigate Hollywood’s hiring practices.) The success and might of femaleled production companies, like Reese Witherspoon’s firm and Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland, along with the box office bounty brought by women- led films, also played roles.
“The dominance of strong female characters over a certain age, the # MeToo movement, the Time’s Up campaign all result from decades of work and years of women resisting and speaking out about the limiting narrative media spread about our worth,” Newsom said.
Needless to say, Hollywood is a long way from being a happy, joyous and equitable place for women. For one thing, there’s a bit of a sexual harassment prob- lem, as perhaps you’ve heard. ( But hey, it’s everywhere!) For another, women continue to be grossly under- represented onscreen and off.
Researchers at the University of Southern California found that in the 100 top- grossing films of 2016, less than a third of the speaking characters ( 31.4 per cent) were women. In those 100 films, only 34 had women as the lead or one of the leads. And of those, a mere eight were 45 or older. That was an improvement f rom the year before, when there were five.
Which makes t his year ’s batch of Oscar-nominated ladies all the more remarkable.
The average age of the supporting actress nominees is 55, and the youngest nominee in that category is Mary J. Blige, who just turned 47. ( Octavia Spencer turns 48 in May.) The runaway favourite for best actress, McDormand, is 60.
Sure McDormand’s f ellow nominee, Ronan, is 23, but she plays a pretty tough customer in Lady Bird, and also has never been considered an ingenue. ( See Hannah, or her bonechilling performance i n The Crucible.) Robbie, who is 27, officially graduated from ingenue status with her fierce, fearless performance in I, Tonya.
The remaining nominated actresses are all in their 60s, with the exceptions of Sally Hawkins, who is 41, and Janney, 58. (“Oscars so menopausal?” suggested a person close to this columnist, falling silent after she shot him daggers with her eyes.)
At the very least, this shows t he expanding horizons f or women in Hollywood, something Nicole Kidman, 50, highlighted after winning a Screen Actors Guild Award on Sunday night. “Twenty years ago we were pretty washed up by this stage in our lives,” she said. “That’s not the case now. We’ve proven that we’re potent, powerful and viable.”
Maybe, for all my resistance to the word, a new hashtag is apt. #OscarsSoBadass. Bring it.