CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, January 12, 2011

No female directors among DGA nominees

latimes.com: "The odds of a woman repeating as best director at the Oscars again this year got a lot slimmer on Monday as the Directors Guild of America announced its nominees for outstanding achievement in a feature film. The DGA nominations, very often a bellwether for the Academy Awards' best director nominees, selected five men for its shortlist: Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, Tom Hooper, Christopher Nolan and David O. Russell.

3 comments:

emilyannegibson said...

I'm always torn on issues about equality like this - should women be included just for diversity, even if they may not have necessarily done the best work? While I sort of think it's a little pear-shaped when award categories are filled with one "type," I would never want to throw in an "other" just to claim diversity. I think as long as it is truly about the work that was created, it shouldn't matter if every nominee is male. People are being judged by their work, not their gender.

Sophia Mysel said...

This is a difficult issue. Someone should definitely not be nominated due to their gender, but according to this article, "...making Bigelow the first woman to win that prize in either organization's history", it is noted that only one woman has won this award. Being 2011, it is difficult to see why only one woman ever won, chances being that women do not consistently direct work that is not as good as the male director's movies. Seeing the nominations for this year, though, it is easy to see why those movies would be nominated, leaving no room for others. Hopefully work can be judged without nominating a movie simply because the director is male, or simply because a director is female, and that equality is evident in the choices made.

Ariel Beach-Westmoreland said...

I agree with everyone else. I would like to hope that there are no women nominees by chance, but who knows. I think it's important to note that this lack of women nominated for the award perhaps reflects not the judgement of the nominators, but of the directing field today. In general there is still a higher number of men within the field than women, and there are absolutely a higher number of men directors on bigger, "oscar nominated" films. If you ask someone to same a female director, you're bound to just hear "Julie Taymore" or "Sophia Coppala", instead of a plethora of male names.