Tag Archive for 'Academy Awards'

Here’s the beginning:

In less than one week, March 7 to be exact, the Hollywood awards season will be over, and chances are very good that for the first time a woman—Kathryn Bigelow—will have won the best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker.  Three other women (Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion and Sophia Coppola) have been nominated in the 82 years that the Academy has held its awards, but with due respect to them and their films, none of them had a shot.

This year is different.  Based on earlier awards by critics and more recently by the Directors Guild (a first for a woman director) and the British academy (BAFTA)—as well as conversations with several Oscar watchers—the consensus is that Bigelow is at the front of the pack to win the award.  Last week, Time magazine got into the act titling its story “The Front Runner.” Forgive me for not sounding the trumpets in advance but we all have seen female front runners fade. While there are many reasons to believe that Bigelow will win, there is something in the back of my head that screams caution remembering the Gloria Steinem piece from the 2008 election season “Women are Never Front-Runners.”

Read full piece here

“The ‘cumulative’ factor of a series of pre-Oscar wins can be a powerful aphrodisiac for Academy voters.” So says Pete Hammond of the LA Times, quoting “one producer and former studio head who told me he very much understands the psychology of Oscar voting.”

Yes, women, the handicappers will all tell you that your vote no longer matters. They’ve posted their predictions, the dye is already cast, and they dare you to say otherwise. But remember those great headlines from 1948: “Dewey Defeats Truman!” We all know “it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings,” and this particular fat lady is still in mid-aria.

On what basis are the handicappers handicapping? Do the prognosticators really know what you are thinking?

The “cumulative factor” is based on all the votes of all the people who have already voted, and people have been voting since early December. I know this for a fact because I voted in early December (as a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association).

But drill down, and you will quickly learn that the New York Film Critics Circle lists 33 members, 8 of whom are women (24%), while the LA Film Critics Association lists 52 members, 10 of whom are women (19%). And here in Chicago, I am one of 8 women on a membership list of 57 (14%).

(To keep my sanity, I just assume that all the names I can’t identify, like LAFCA’s “F.X. Feeny,” belong to women. In fact, “F.X. Feeny” is a man. I just checked and found him on Google. But I can’t check every name, so I’d rather overestimate than underestimate.)

What about the Guilds? If you’re a DGA member, then you know better than I do who your fellow DGA members are, and ditto if you’re a WGA member. But suffice it to say that in both cases, the pattern holds. Well over 50% of both groups are male.

Right now, I’m not concerned with the whys and wherefores of this statistical distribution. I just want to confirm what most of you already know: women are significantly underrepresented in most of the groups whose votes are combined to create the “cumulative factor.” In other words, this “cumulative factor” primarily represents male opinion.

Facts like these used to be very difficult to find. A few years back, I contacted the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and asked for a membership list. No luck. But after recent critiques by journalists like Sharon Waxman, the HFPA is now happy to post a membership list on its website. And surprise, surprise, the current list is almost equally balanced between male and female members. And this is how change happens: women must dig deep, question assumptions, and make our voices heard.

This year, there’s been a big rule change (from 5 Best Picture candidates to 10), so there’s a great deal of interest in “the rules.” Handicappers can’t handicap if they don’t know the rules, so all kinds of information is suddenly a few clicks away. For example, I recently learned from the Wall Street Journal that approximately 6,000 Academy members will vote this year, and approximately 1/3 of you are women. Numbers like that make me smile.

Final ballots are due next Tuesday, March 2, at 5 PM (PT).  So before you vote, I’d like to make one final appeal: forget everything you’ve heard, resist the “aphrodisiac” effect of the “cumulative factor,” and just vote with your heart for the films, performances, and technical accomplishments that you really believe are the best. If you do, then March 7, 2010 might well be filled with surprises!

______________________

Film critic Jan Lisa Huttner blogs at The Hot Pink Pen.  Her article on the 2004 Oscars for Women’s eNews (which showed how a record number of women directors and screenwriters had impacted the most high profile nominations) received the “Best News Writing for the Web” award from the National Federation of Press Women in 2005.

Yesterday, 121 Oscar nominees gathered to celebrate themselves and get their marching order for the show (speeches can only be 45 seconds.)

Anne Thompson has a report from the event.

How fun would it have been to be in that room where Tom Sherak the head of the Academy said to the nominees that “everyone is equal.”

Here’s the 2010 class picture

In  case you care- Kathryn Bigelow is in white on second row third in from the right side between Morgan Freeman and Jeremy Renner.

You have to check out the NY Magazine piece that Mark Harris wrote on the Oscar campaign.  The more I read and learn about this stuff, the more it resembles politics with handlers telling people what to wear, what to say, where to go and how to act.

It seems so bizarre, but there is a lot at stake here, not only money, but prestige and bragging rights.  If you were a person in the film business and lucky to work on something that had Oscar potential, you would work your ass off to get there.  Cause, really, how many people in the world can say they are an Academy Award winner or even nominee.  Oscar is the top of the mountain.

But while on the surface everything looks pretty, Mark Harris dives into the ickiness factor that starts seeping out of the awards circuit if you look a bit too closely.  Looking at the reality of the merry go round these actors, directors and stars go on reminds me of the push towards election day.  Kissing babies and shaking hands all towards that coveted Oscar nomination.

Here are some of the parts I liked.

When Sandra Bullock tied with Meryl Streep at the Broadcast Film Critics Awards:

Bullock, who has never come anywhere near an Oscar nomination but is riding a wave of big box office and positive press for The Blind Side, is almost as good as Streep at the podium: She gives the kind of emotive, funny, ingratiating speech that makes people say, “Maybe she should win,” just because it seems like fun. All at once, we have a contest—and the most interesting acting face-off of the season, since the excellent narrative behind Streep (namely, There Is No Way on God’s Green Earth That This Woman Should Have Fewer Best Actress Oscars Than Hilary Swank) must now fight off Bullock’s, the much simpler Who’da Thunk It?!

Continue reading ‘Oscar Campaigning’

It’s been over a week since the DGA win, and almost a week since Kathryn Bigelow got her best director Oscar nomination and it turns out that since then, she has been nominated for a second Oscar as one of the producers for her film The Hurt Locker.  (When the nominations were announced last week, the credit were still pending.)  So, if she wins best director and The Hurt Locker wins best picture — both are conceivable — she will win two Oscars in one night.

The reason why I want to talk about it is because I think that no matter how much Ms. Bigelow doesn’t want to talk about the gender implications in her nomination, they are everywhere.  I heard them when I was listened to the Oscar Talk podcast when Kris Tapley called her “hot” and Anne Thompson said that she’s not 100% convinced she will win because the Academy is “overwhelmingly male and she just doesn’t trust them.”

I started thinking about this a lot more this weekend when I was reading the excellent new book Notes from the Cracked Ceiling by Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut which is all about the gender issues and the 2008 election.  The book talks about how lots of people, especially young women, think that we have achieved equality, we are far from equal and what happened to the female candidates are examples of how far we have to go.  (Mind you I haven’t gotten past the Hillary Clinton section yet.)

While many believe we live in a “post feminist” culture, 2008 reminded us how far we still have to go.

But in hindsight, 2008 turned out to be just the opposite for women: a severe letdown, with damaging consequences.  It revided old sterotypes, divided the women’s movement, drove apart mothers and daughters, and set back the cause of equality in the political sphere by decades.

and

…the political culture does not take women as seriously as we would like to think.  The glass ceiling may be cracked, as Hillary Clinton declared at the end of her presidential campaign.  But it is far from broken.

Women in politics, though very different from women in Hollywood, still gives us a context to think about how women are looked at in general.

We all know that the Hollywood culture doesn’t take women as seriously as we would like to think they do.  The fact that there are so few female writers, so few female directors, so few female centric films are right off the top examples of the problems Hollywood has with women. Continue reading ‘Pondering the Bigelow Nomination in Larger Context’

Here’s the link to my BBC interview:

Women & Hollywood Talks Oscar Nominations on the BBC

Building on our earlier conversation about Golden Globes, I reached out to many different female film writers and bloggers about the Oscar nominations.

I laid out a couple of things to consider:

• A woman directed movie, The Hurt Locker matched a male directed movie, Avatar – nomination for nomination. Pretty groundbreaking.
• 3 of the 10 best picture nominations — Precious, An Education, The Blind Side — were for movies about women.
• 2 of the 10 best picture nominations were directed by women — An Education, The Hurt Locker.
• Only one of the five nominees for best adapted screenplay has a woman: District 9 – Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
• NO woman was nominated for original screenplay.
• Bright Star got only one nomination for costume design.
• Meryl Streep got her 16th nomination, the most ever and Sandra Bullock as well as Gabby Sidibe and Carey Mulligan got their firsts.
• Lastly, what does Bigelow’s nomination here and win at the DGA mean for women directors (if anything.)

The participants include (in alphabetical order):

Manohla Dargis, NY Times: Jan Lisa Huttner, The Hot Pink Pen; MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher; Jenni Miller, Cinematical; Mary Pols, Time; Katey Rich, Cinemablend; Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer; Shannon Ridler, The Movie Moxie; Sasha Stone, Awards Daily; Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

Some answered the questions, some gave other quotes and thoughts.

Manohla Dargis:

I’m just glad that Bigelow has received this initial recognition. There’s really not much more that can be said on this subject until she actually wins.

Jan Lisa Huttner:

Although the number of noms is the same the quality of these noms is very different.  With the exception of Best Picture & Best Director, AVATAR’s noms are all technical, whereas noms for THE HURT LOCKER include the major categories of BEST ACTOR & BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY.  (Major/Minor being determined by what gets announced on Nominations Morning versus what just goes out in the press release for Oscar junkies like us.)  In this respect, ROTTEN TOMATOES is an accurate guide.  As of today, AVATAR stands @ 82% Fresh whereas THE HURT LOCKER stands @ 97% Fresh, way ahead of all other candidates qualitatively speaking.

I’m especially pleased that Jeremy Renner was nominated because his face in close-up is the core image in THE HURT LOCKER & I think Kathryn Bigelow directed him brilliantly.  I have some hope that the 9 noms will make more people see his extraordinary performance now that THE HURT LOCKER is a top contender beyond the best director barrier-buster.  Momentum for THE HURT LOCKER will surely build as more people see it, & if a significant number of voters decide to “vote the ticket,” he just might squeak thru.  One lives in hope!

This is a break-through year for women characters, & in particular, this should be appreciated as “the year of the woman as teacher.”  Look at the all the contenders again & you’ll see this thread running through almost all of this year’s “female-oriented” noms.  Who saves Precious?  Ms. Rain!  Who saves Jenny?  Miss Stubbs!  (See more on this below.)  Who are Leigh Anne Tuohy’s key allies: Miss Sue (Kathy Bates) & Mrs. Boswell (Kim Dickens).

If I ruled the world, contenders would have included BRIGHT STAR, JULIE & JULIA, and THE LOVELY BONES.  Me, I nominated UP IN THE AIR for the Women Film Critics Circle’s “Hall of Shame Award,” & to call it “an adaptation” of Walter Kirns’ book is ludicrous.

I have BRIGHT STAR as a Top Contender in my own BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY category.  Whether you agree with me on this or not, I sincerely believe that BRIGHT STAR stands in much closer relation to Andrew Motion’s KEATS Bio than the “adaptation” of Walter Kirns’ novel in the UP IN THE AIR screenplay.  But bottom line, in this particular category I am simply thrilled that Nick Hornby was nominated for AN EDUCATION!!!  His screenplay opens with Miss Stubbs, closes with Miss Stubbs, & has Miss Stubbs mention the name “Mr. Rochester” THREE TIMES in between, so shame on anyone who’s surprised to learn that David “has secrets” in Act Three!!!

But here’s a fact that’s more important: Meryl Streep has not won an Oscar in 26 years!!!  Yet again, critics have used her brilliance primarily to damn her collaborators (in this case Amy Adams & Nora Ephron)–what’s up with that?!?  If they’re going to reward Jeff Bridges for CRAZY HEART then for sure, they should NOT “yawn” about Streep this year & pass her over yet again. (And I say this also having loved all the other contenders).

The Bigelow nomination means EVERYTHING!!!  Another huge crack in the celluloid ceiling!!!  Do not buy into the BS: Bigelow’s films have often included strong supporting women’s roles not to mention two wonderful female leads (Jamie Leigh Curtis in BLUE STEEL & Sara Polley in THE WEIGHT OF WATER).  Most offensive: Embedding in the gossipy “Exes Issue” is the not so subtle implication that she’s riding on Cameron’s coat tails.  Those of us who know better must fight back!!!  Yes, she’s a babe.  Yes, she’s got great legs.  Yes, she was once married to James Cameron.  But, guess what: THE HURT LOCKER is a riveting film that’s 97% Fresh, Bigelow has Lifetime Achievement, & oh yes, women hold up half the sky! Continue reading ‘Women Writers React to the Oscar Nominations’