Israeli director calls out Golden Globes for lack of female director nominees
There has been a great deal of outrage in the movie industry over the lack of Golden Globe nominations for women in the Best Director category, following the nominations announcement on Monday, and Alma Har’el, an Israeli director currently working in Hollywood, has a radical proposal for how to change that.
“Unless we have a new category for women directors – the same way we have [separate] actor and actress categories – we won’t see any changes,” she said in an interview with Variety on Monday.
Har’el’s most recent film is Honey Boy, a coming-of-age story loosely based on the life of its star and screenwriter, Shia LaBeouf. Har’el won a Special Jury Prize for the film at the Sundance Film Festival last January. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film’s failure to get a Golden Globe nominations constituted a major snub.
Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman, whose 2015 directorial debut was the Hebrew-language adaptation of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, raised the issue of lack of women Golden Globe nominees in 2018 when she presented the Best Director award with Ron Howard and said, “And here are the all-male nominees.” Last year’s nominees were all male as well.
Har’el, who has also directed acclaimed documentaries and successful music videos, pleaded for the public to recognize the extent of the problem.
“They dare to say they don’t judge by gender but that’s exactly what they do. There were so many films this year that connected with audiences and critics as well as performed at the box office, and this group is out of touch and doesn’t see any of us. Zero women script writers. Zero best films by women. Zero women directors nominated. I will not live my life as a filmmaker who plans to keep working subjected to a group of voters that doesn’t see us.”
Only five female directors have ever been nominated for Golden Globes: Barbra Streisand, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow (who was nominated twice) and Ava DuVernay (the most recent female nominee, for the 2014 film Selma). Streisand is the only woman who has ever won, in 1984, for Yentl.
This year, a number of women directors, in addition to Har’el, were considered major contenders for the Globes, including Greta Gerwig for Little Women (which received two nominations, one for its star, Saoirse Ronan, and one for Best Score), Olivia Wilde for Booksmart (which received a Best Actress nod for Beanie Feldman) and Melina Matsoukas for the critically acclaimed Queen and Slim. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, a Chinese-American film, was nominated in the Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language category.