Women were completely shut out of this major Oscars category—yet again
Even though there’s no lack of talented female directors out there, awards shows frequently snub them in favor of their male counterparts. In fact, female nominees for Best Director are so rare that when Greta Gerwig received a nod in 2018, she was only the fifth woman ever to be nominated. And our wound has been reopened because not a single woman was nominated for the Best Director category this year.
The five all-male nominees are Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Adam McKay (Vice), and Paweł Pawlikowski (Cold War). There’s no denying that these directors deserve the acclaim they’ve received—HuffPost notes that this year is Lee’s first time in the running for Best Director, despite acclaimed films like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. But there were also many female directors who created excellent work this year.
Marielle Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? which earned Melissa McCarthy a Best Actress nomination and has a 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And the National Society of Film Critics named The Rider, directed by Chloé Zhao, Best Picture of 2018. In more than 90 years of Academy Awards, only one (one!) woman has received an Oscar for Best Director. That director, Kathryn Bigelow, took home filmmaking’s top prize in 2010—almost 10 years ago.
Twitter users were understandably unhappy with this year’s lack of female nominees.
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reading about the Oscar nominees for Best Director and looking at the pronouns like pic.twitter.com/WMOiHpEOdU
— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) January 22, 2019
If you assume women have equal opportunity (they don’t), interest (they do), and ability (they do) to direct films nominated for Best Director, the likelihood of women getting two or fewer nominations in the last decade is somewhere on order of 1 in 900,000,000,000 #OscarNoms
— Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) January 22, 2019
We can still count on one hand the women who have been nominated for best director.
Wertmuller
Campion
Coppola
Bigelow
Gerwig— Melissa Silverstein (@melsil) January 22, 2019
There's at least one slot on the Best Director noms list that should have Marielle Heller's name on it… https://t.co/BsohQBI5Fg
— Kurt Loder (@kurt_loder) January 22, 2019
Last year was discouraging for female filmmakers in other ways, too. A recent report from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that out of more than 1,200 films in 2018, only 46 (4%) were directed by women. Women of color were even more underrepresented, with only four black female directors, two Asian female directors, and one Latina director included in the 1,200 films examined.
"It's an honour just to be nominated," no woman director will say at the #Oscars this year.#OscarNoms pic.twitter.com/1TaKFlJDJ6
— UN Women (@UN_Women) January 22, 2019
It may not technically be surprising to see five men nominated for Best Director, but it’s no less disappointing. We can see that gender inequality is still alive and well in the film industry, and something needs to change.
