Rachel Abramowitz of the LA Times and Lisa Schwarzbaum of EW weigh in on what a Bigelow win means for women (and the business.)
Abramowitz’ piece In Hollywood, female film directors are still the exception lays out the stats on where women are and how far we still have to go:
Bigelow’s likely ascension to the podium at the Academy Awards has provided a jolt of adrenaline.
For instance, neither Warner Bros., the world’s largest studio, nor Paramount Pictures hired a single female director last year, while Walt Disney Studios and Universal Studios hired just one apiece. No woman has ever been hired to direct an event picture with a budget of more than $100 million, the kind of film most valued by the Hollywood machine.
One apparent growth arena for women is in working for other women. Streep, for instance, told The Times that she attributes her box office renaissance to the fact that she opted to do three films, “Mamma Mia,” “Julie & Julia,” and “It’s Complicated,” that were written and directed by women, as well as backed by studios with women as presidents of production or even higher in rank.
And Schwartzbaum’s piece Kathryn Bigelow: If she wins the Oscar for directing, does that mean it’s been a great year for women?
As a movie-lover, I hope Bigelow wins, because of, well, her great directing of The Hurt Locker. As a woman (and thus, apparently, an oracle for the purposes of his little pre-Oscar feature) I’m aware of and excited about the significance of such a win, since she’d be, oh, the first woman ever to take the trophy in that category (and only the fourth ever nominated). But as a movie-lover, I’d like to think that if a man had directed The Hurt Locker as well as Bigelow did, then he would win the Oscar. I’d like to think that if Bigelow wins, the biggest benefit for women who want to make movies in Hollywood — a Hollywood run, as most of the world is run, by men — would be greater industry-wide recognition that talent comes in all sexes, colors, and sizes. A woman can make an action flick or a war movie; a man can make a feminine romance. All we want is to see stories that move us, excite us, entertain us, challenge us. Sometimes those movies are about alien blue people. More often, those movies are about people with whom we can identify, characters who look as young or old as we are. And as male or female, too.
AMEN.
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