Friday, January 25, 2019
Oscar Nominations’ Lack of Women Directors Reinforces Status Quo
Variety: Unconscionable. Unbelievable. Unsurprising. Once again, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has failed to nominate even a single woman in its best director category. It is the 86th time in the Academy’s 91-year history of awarding Oscars that the membership has seen fit to nominate an exclusively male slate.
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This article reminds me of an article that came out last week of the Green Page from the Chicago Tribune about how men dominating the theatre industry hurts women. The core message I got from that article is that male written stories have been hierarchized above female written stories and thus male written stories have become overvalued. I see that pattern here in the Academy Award Nominations. Male directors have always ruled over the best directors category, and thus they have retained the most publicity, and thus have become the status quo in the nominations. Only within the last year have I started paying attention to entertainment industry awards, and I knew that females were heavily left out of the ring of winners, but I had NO idea that only one female had won best director, and that for only 5 various years have there been female nominees for that category. The Academy really does hold a ton of influence, and it clear that they no intention of using their influence to make a larger difference when it comes to females being recognized and supported and advertised.
This article paints the cruel reality of the world , especially of the entertainment industry. The fact that women have been, since a long time, not given credit for their work or even recognized for it, has never been denied. But with the way things had been shaping up for women, with the #TimesUp and #Metoo movement telling the world the importance of women and their work, it was, atleast to a slight degree expected that the Academy nominations for best director will include a few female directors. But is it surprising that that did not happen? Not quite!
Its not that women should be nominated only because of their gender; they should be nominated because of the quality of work that they have produced. Because as this years stands testimony to, female directors have created works that have garnered both appreciation and respect. In such a scenario when the women have done everything but they are still not recognized at the biggest award nominations of the world, the reality of how the nomination still hasn't changed and continues to be patriarchal.
And this has repercussions, as has been correctly pointed out in this article. By not receiving the nomination they deserve, female directors are loosing out on their chance to continue to be recognized and engage in more work taht would deemed as more credible than their first ever piece of work.
This is the biggest setback for women and the harshest reality about the nomination committee.
This article hits a really strong point within Hollywood and whenever I hear or read something like this, it always makes me wonder why. Why is it that female directors aren’t in the Oscar nominations this year? Are there any making it to the process in the first place where the films are reviewed and then decided on for nomination? Or, maybe they aren’t being chosen because of an engrained bias within deep conscious that was developed from the moment you were born till your current being, preventing them from even getting to the viewing portion of the process? Maybe it’s a combination of one of those and the fact that there are only female directors filling 8% of directors. Whatever the case may be needs to be remedied and while it should be a conscious effort to put the energy into that now t should also be an effort to figure out why so that this mentality can be switched into one that is more equalizing of people today.
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