Give the Girls a Great Big Hand

Special for Digital Filmmaker
by Jan Lisa Huttner

When you’re a film critic, Oscar Night is a bit of a bore. We’re like political pundits energized by the primaries; from long experience, we know that by the time election night rolls around, most of the important issues have already been decided. So my biggest day of the year is the day that Oscar nominations are announced, not the day awards are actually distributed.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” co-directed by Valerie Faris (left) & Jonathan Dayton (right) received four Oscar nominations on 2/23/07 including Best Picture. Photo credit: Eric Lee © Fox Searchlight. All Rights Reserved.

We take elections very seriously here in Chicago, and as Bruce Dumont, one of my favorite Chicago commentators, taught me long ago: “Ya gotta have someone to beat someone.” So since I’m a film critic who specializes in women filmmakers, the last two years have been pretty discouraging. While women have made advances in almost every other endeavor, from fighting (and yes, dying) in Iraq to running for President (in reality as well as on TV),  the Celluloid Ceiling keeps a tight lid on expectations in Hollywood and beyond. But this year, there was actually reason for hope. For only the second time in our new millennium, a film directed by a woman was actually nominated for Best Picture!

Let’s pause for a minute to drill deeper into my favorite day. Oscar nominations are always announced on a Tuesday morning, the Tuesday that comes four weeks before the Sunday when the awards are distributed. The ritual begins when the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) invites a prominent actor to join him at 5:30 AM (Hollywood time) to announce the nominees in the top nine categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Foreign Language Film. In New York, where it’s already 8:35 AM, all the network morning shows are poised and ready to broadcast live telephone interviews with some of the early favorites. (The rest of the nominees are subsequently announced in a press release.)

Last year was pretty grim. Looking beyond the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories, only two women made it on to the list: Diana Ossana (who co-wrote the screenplay for Best Picture candidate “Brokeback Mountain”) and Cristina Comencini (who wrote and directed the Best Foreign Language Film candidate “The Beast in the Heart”).

The year before that was really grim: not one woman filmmaker, not one woman writer or one woman director, was nominated in any of these seven categories (beyond Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress) in 2005. This was particularly discouraging because 2004 had been the best year for women filmmakers in Oscar’s entire history: women filmmakers were not only nominated, they actually won! 2004 is memorable as the year that Sofia Coppola became the first American woman ever nominated for Best Director, and she is still only the third woman in seventy-nine years ever nominated for this honor. (3 out of 395 for 79 years times 5 candidates per year is .0076%!)

Coppola’s film, “Lost in Translation,” did not win Best Picture, but she did win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The Oscar for Best Picture went to “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” and Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh shared the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay that year with Ring’s director Peter Jackson. Screenwriter Marieke van der Pol was not so lucky. Her film, the Dutch drama “Twin Sisters,” lost out to “The Barbarian Invasions” in the Best Foreign Language Film race.

Still, in a statistical profile, every data point counts, so here’s the picture I had in my mind as I bit my nails on Tuesday AM, January 23, 2007, and waited for Sid Ganis and Salma Hayek to take the stage:
 

(* = winners, also shown in red)

With this background, I hope you can now understand why I was flying high by the time the folks on the TODAY show started their handicapping:

Of course the morning wasn’t a complete triumph.  Valerie Faris (and her husband and partner Jonathan Dayton) weren’t nominated for Best Director, and “The Devil Wears Prada,” one of my personal candidates for Best Picture, received only two token nominations (for Best Actress and Best Costume Design), leaving Aline Brosh McKenna with only a Writers Guild of America nomination to console her.  (That’s generally a good predictor, so I took this loss especially hard.)  And when I looked at the full list, I was very disappointed that “The Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing,” co-directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck, didn’t appear on the Best Documentary list.  But despite my own mixed emotions about “Letters from Iwo Jima, “ I’m still cheering for Iris Yamashita (who now becomes the first woman filmmaker of Asian background ever nominated), and over all, I’ve been down so long, this looks like up to me.
 
It would be nice to think that last year’s angry protests coupled with the fabulous “Queen Kong” billboard have finally helped to raise world-wide awareness of the Celluloid Ceiling problem.  One lives in hope.

.........................................................................................................................
Jan Lisa Huttner is the managing editor of Films for Two: The Online Guide for Busy Couples. In addition to freelance work for a variety of print and online publications, Jan writes regular columns for the JUF News, Chicago's Jewish community monthly, and Chicago Woman, a bi-monthly published by The Woman's Newspapers. She is an active member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Illinois Woman's Press Association.
 

About Us| DV/Film | Photo | Forums | | Home