The Mary Sue: The Oscars are coming up in a little over a week, and thankfully the ceremony won’t as white as it’s been in the past. With Hidden Figures, Moonlight, Fences, and Lion all nominated for Best Picture, actors like Denzel Washington, Ruth Negga, and Viola Davis nominated for acting awards, and Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins nominated for Best Director, there has been some progress made. Where less progress has been made is in the area of female filmmakers.
4 comments:
I get a small spark of pride and hope every time I read an article about women fighting their way into the entertainment industry. Film has always been a challenging medium for women to break into, and I’m glad that our numbers are gaining. The article states: “Female producers are also more likely to bring other women onto projects and tell female stories. Says Gigliotti, “It is incumbent on women producers to make movies about women for a variety of reasons. One is, if we don’t do it, who will? Secondly, from a purely economic point of view, I just proved [with Hidden Figures] that if you put women in the lead of a movie you can make over $100 million.” (That film’s domestic gross? $132 million and counting…) The crew on Hidden Figures was 33% women, which is a lot when you consider that the average Hollywood film’s crew is 12% women.” Which is wonderful, women boosting other women up is what we should all be aiming for.
It's really great to know that the entertainment industry is slowly moving towards gender equality in filmmaking. The rise of female producers creating female-lead work is something that will hopefully cause a ripple effect throughout the film industry as a whole. This quote in particular really resonated with me in this article: “It is incumbent on women producers to make movies about women for a variety of reasons. One is, if we don’t do it, who will?" I completely agree with Gigliotti on this point. This reminds me of an article that I read about on the blog last year about female writers including more well-developed female characters in their work. In order to get these female writers out there we need female producers helping them along the way. Even though we are still miles away from true equality in film making with women empowering other women we're on the right track
This is extremely exciting because producing is absolutely still a male dominated part of the arts industry. Just the other day I was discussing the percentage of Oscar nominees that were women (and it's low) and one of my friends said, the producing categories probably skew that so much because those are almost always teams of like 9 or 10 men. He was right and I always understood that producers were mostly men but it was a part of the business I never realized we had made such little progress in, and then I realized that the reason we have made such little progress is because producing jobs are the ones that really matter, they are the decision makers, and as much as I think that women are making progress businesses don't see us as effective leaders and we can pretend that that isn't true because the proof is the statistics. So I am glad we are starting to make the change high up, because women hire women, and that is what we need to close the wage gap, and the percentage of women working at high level positions across all businesses.
I agree with Kelly, and I too feel a victory every time one of these articles are posted. At first I wasn't aware of the systemic sexism in the entertainment work force. I believed this industry was fair and representative of people of all creeds, orientations, genders, race, etc. These past two years have completely changed my perspective of the way we as artists interact with each other. My introduction to the sexism in the work force was actually not first hand, rather, it took place on my television screen: Smash! The Tv show was one of my favorites, with one of the characters portraying a female producer. Everyone in the beginning of the first season, belittled her intelligence and expressed their concerns about her producing such a large show without the help her husband. The show a season later broke barriers and "awarded" a fictional tony award to the female led production.
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