Awards
Orange is the New Black and Fargo Tie for Most Critics’ Choice Wins
With three wins each, Orange is the New Black (Netflix) and Fargo (FX) took home the most trophies at the 2014 Critics’ Choice Awards. OITNB won Best Comedy Series, a tie for Best Supporting...
Janet Malcolm, Hanya Yanagihara, and Victoria Wilson Among 2014 PEN Literary Award Nominees
Janet Malcolm, Hanya Yanagihara, and Victoria Wilson are some of the female writers shortlisted for the 2014 PEN Literary Awards. Yanagihara is the only woman writer eligible for one of the PEN...
Cate Blanchett: “People Want to See Stories With Women at the Center”
After using her Best Actress win at the Oscars as a platform to call for more movies about women (“the world is round, people”), Cate Blanchett recently spoke out again on behalf of her fellow...
Audra McDonald Sets Two Records at the 2014 Tony Awards
Theater legend Audra McDonald set two records at the Tonys last night by becoming the first performer to win all four acting categories and receiving the highest number of acting prizes in the...
The Mindy Project, The Good Wife, and Orange is the New Black Earn Multiple TCA Nods
Several perpetually overlooked shows when it comes to awards time by and about women were nominated by the Television Critics Association Awards. Robert and Michelle King’s The Good Wife led the...
Female-Directed Films Comprise 43% of Student Academy Award Winners
Shorts directed or co-directed by female filmmakers made up 43% of the winners at the 41st Student Academy Awards competition. Fourteen films, representing 16 aspiring helmers, were honored by the...
Winnie Holzman to Receive Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement
Winnie Holzman, best known for creating My So-Called Life, Once and Again and co-creating Huge, will receive a lifetime achievement honor for writing the book and lyrics to the worldwide hit Wicked,...
Reese Witherspoon’s Wild Will Open December 5th
Will Wild usher in Reese Witherspoon’s own version of a “McConaissance”? A release date has been set for Wild — and that release date is very Oscar-friendly. Wild, an adaptation of...
Dawn Hudson Signs New Three Year Contract With the Academy
Dawn Hudson’s early tenure at the Academy was tumultuous but let’s be real, it takes time to figure out how to run something this big, but also it takes the will of the board to allow a new...
Women Directors Helmed Nearly 40% of Student Oscar Finalists
Female filmmakers directed or co-directed 38% of the shorts in the running for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 41st Student Academy Awards competition. Female directors were best...
Women Writers Make The New Yorker the Most Feted Publication at National Magazine Awards
The New Yorker won four prizes at the 2014 National Magazine Awards, including individual accolades for TV critic Emily Nussbaum, author Zadie Smith, and journalist and feminist critic Ariel Levy....
Zero Motivation Director Talya Lavie Wins Top Prize at Tribeca
Director Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation won the Tribeca Film Festival’s top prize yesterday. Lavie described her feature debut as “a comi-tragic glimpse into Israeli military society” in an...
Crosspost: What’s It Going to Take for Gender Equality to Come to Hollywood?
Crossposted with permission from Awards Daily. The WGA diversity report, released on April 15, delivered this rather devastating news about women screenwriters in Hollywood: While women and other...
Meryl Streep Receives Monte Cristo Award from Eugene O’Neill Center
Last night, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center honored Meryl Streep with the Monte Cristo Award, one of the most prestigious acting awards in the country. The ceremony was a homecoming for Streep,...
Donna Tartt, Annie Baker Win Pulitzers
Novelist Donna Tartt and playwright Annie Baker have won the Pulitzer Prize’s most prestigious categories. Filmmaker Laura Poitras also won for her NSA articles in collaboration with Glenn...
Orange is the New Black, Scandal, Borgen Among Peabody Winners
The Peabody Awards have named a record 46 winners this year in their ongoing efforts to recognizing “stories that matter.” Twenty of the awardees (43%) — which range from journalism to...
Cate Blanchett, Kerry Washington, Rose Byrne Honored by Women in Film
Cate Blanchett, Kerry Washington, Rose Byrne, Eva Longoria, and Frozen director Jennifer Lee are the five honorees of this year’s Crystal + Lucy Awards. Organized by Women in Film — Los...
Janine Nabers Wins Yale Playwriting Prize
The Yale Drama Series competition, which recognizes full-length, unpublished plays in English, has announced Janine Nabers the winner of its 2014 prize. Nabers was chosen by judge Marsha Norman,...
Jennifer Lopez to Receive GLAAD Award
Jennifer Lopez will receive GLAAD’s Vanguard Award later this spring. The award honors entertainers who have made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for LGBT people. Lopez will...
Petition Launched to Include Katniss Among MTV Awards’ Heroes
The MTV Awards raised the Internet’s hackles last week by snubbing The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen from its Best Hero category. Sure, the awards are “little more than a corporate-sponsored...
Women-Directed Films Win Top Prizes at SXSW
Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers’ hipster comedy Fort Tilden and Margaret Brown’s Gulf-spill documentary The Great Invisible took home the top prizes at SXSW this year. In an interview...
Suck It, Haters: Female-Led Films Make More Money
“Sorry, Cate Blanchett: ‘Films with women at the center’ don’t make money,” proclaims an embarrassing editorial by Marcus James Dixon at the Gold Derby today. Dixon was referring, of...
The World is Round, People and Other Thoughts from a Potentially Game Changing Oscars
I don’t know about you, but things felt a bit different last night. In fact, let’s be honest, they’ve felt different for some time now. It’s not just one thing. It’s Tina and Amy at the...
The Big O: Between Ellen and Everyone’s Mom, Oscar Night Turned Into Ladies Night
For a year with no female talent represented in the director’s category and only three of the nine best-picture candidates featuring women in lead roles, the Oscar show was a regular femme fest....
The Oscars’ Giant Gender Gap Isn’t Closing
Progress is all around us: there are more women than men in college, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire all over America and Europe, and black and Latino and Asian firsts (and seconds and...
The Big O: Who Will Win the Oscars This Sunday — And Who Should
As Oscar watchers count down the minutes to the 86th edition of the Academy Awards this Sunday, those of us who care about promoting women in the film industry have several reasons to count our...
Study Finds Lead Actresses Get Less Screen Time Than Lead Actors
Pop Quiz: When is a lead actress not the center of her film? If you guessed “when she’s in Hollywood,” you’d be right. The New York TImes published a study of the “screen time gap”...
Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Wins Blackburn Prize for Chimerica
British playwright Lucy Kirkwood has been announced as the winner of this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which “recognizes women who have written works of outstanding quality for the...
Infographic: The Diversity Gap in the Academy Awards
It’s never been easy to take the Oscars seriously, but it gets harder each year, especially as the Academy stays white and male while the rest of America (and indeed, the international moviegoing...
Women and the Oscars 2014
It’s Oscar week and on the surface this year feels different. Ellen DeGeneres will host the ceremony, and while I’m sure she will be biting, I doubt that I’m going to feel the need to take a...
NAACP Awards: Black Women Creators Thrive in TV
When the NAACP Image Award nominations unwittingly exposed the film industry’s continued hostility to black women earlier this year, no one could claim surprise. At this weekend’s NAACP awards...
The Big O: In Praise of the 10 Actress Nominees
It is all too easy at this late point in the Oscar season to only focus on the shifting standings in the 24 categories and to ignore the big picture of what this collection of contenders actually...
Five Women Directors Win at Berlinale
Representing five countries on three continents, a quintet of female filmmakers won honors at the 2014 Berlinale but none in the main competition section. Australian Sophie Hyde took home the...
Frozen, Gravity, and Philomena Win at BAFTAs
With so few women-directed films and women-penned screenplays in the running, this awards season doesn’t have much to offer those looking to increase female presence behind...
The Big O: What’s at Stake for Cate in the Woody Debate?
[Editor’s Note: The opinions in this piece belong solely to the author, a columnist hired to assess the Oscar race from the female perspective. Women and Hollywood also published a piece earlier...
Sarah Polley, Breaking Bad’s Gennifer Hutchison Win Big at WGA Awards
Stories We Tell and Breaking Bad were feted as the 2014 Writers Guild favorites this weekend. After being mysteriously snubbed by the Academy this year, Sarah Polley’s family documentary Stories...
Frozen Wins Best Picture at Annie Awards
For the second time since the Annie Awards’ Best Animated Feature prize was established in 1992, a woman-directed film has received the top honor. The Annie Awards are the Oscars of the animation...
No Women Nominees in Top Categories for France’s Cesar Awards
Best Film. Best Director. Best Foreign (Language) Film. These are the categories where women filmmakers have been completely shut out by Oscar and Cesar this year. France’s answer to the Academy...
Women Win Nearly a Third of Sundance Awards
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival came to a close yesterday, culminating in a two-hour awards ceremony hosted by Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Women directors, editors, cinematographers, and...
Shonda Rhimes “Honored” and “Pissed Off” at DGA Awards
Nary a week goes by at Women and Hollywood when we don’t devote a post to Shonda Rhimes. That’s because the Scandal showrunner is one of the few industry insiders with the courage and the...
The Big O: The Truth Behind Emma Thompson and Oscar Isaac’s Oscar Snubs? Lack of Tragedy
When this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, there were a few surprising omissions on the ballot, especially in the acting categories. You wouldthink, for instance, that the 6,000 or so...
Pic of the Day: Emma Thompson Continues Her Campaign Against Heels
It hasn’t been Emma Thompson’s year. Despite being feted by Meryl Streep early this awards season for her performance in Saving Mr. Banks, Thompson was snubbed for an Oscar nomination and has...
The Big O: And the Oscars’ Winning (and Losing) Female Nominees Are…
And so it begins. The 86th Academy Award nominations did the hustle big time for American Hustle, with 10 nominations. From our female perspective, it’s terrific that both Amy Adams, with her...
The Good and the Bad Among the 2014 Oscar Nominees
2013 was an even-worse-than-usual year for non-acting women in Hollywood — only 6% of the 250 top-grossing films were directed by female filmmakers and just 10% written by female...
Women Comprise Majority of National Book Critics Circle Nominees
In the filmmaking world, fiction is dominated by men and nonfiction shared by both genders. Not so in literature. If the National Book Critics Circle is any indicator, the reverse is true. Women...
Interview: Callie Khouri on Female Likability and Nashville’s Upcoming Guest Stars
Nashville creator Callie Khouri first came into prominence as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Thelma and Louise. She is also the director of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Mad Money....
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, Jehane Noujaim are DGA Doc Nominees
Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel are three among the five nonfiction films to receive a Best Documentary nod from the Directors...
NAACP Awards: 2013 Was a Good Year for Black Men in Hollywood, Abysmal for Black Women
2013 was a good year for black men in Hollywood. 12 Years a Slave, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Fruitvale Station, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom gave stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Forest Whitaker,...
Why Amy Poehler and Tina Fey Should Host the Golden Globes Forever
I really like the Golden Globes. I know the Oscar pundits don’t take it seriously as a predictor of what’s to come for the Golden Derby, but the rest of us who don’t think that way could care...
Women Directors Nominated in Nearly Every Narrative Category at DGA-TV Awards
Television is much kinder to women. The opportunities are greater, the stories richer, riskier, and more varied. TV isn’t a haven for women by any means, but they do get more chances to prove...
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, Barbara Kopple Win at Cinema Eye Awards
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, and Barbara Kopple were honored at the seventh annual Cinema Eye Honors, which “recognize and honor exemplary craft and innovation in nonfiction film.” Polley won the...