Who decides which directors deserve to be nominated, awarded, or snubbed?
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Jessica Chastain plays Bigalow's leading lady in Zero Dark Thirty.
The Oscars
Only a few hours after the Oscar nominations were released, the twitter-sphere is overflowing with comments about Kathryn Bigalow’s “snubbing” in the Best Director category. Bigalow’s Zero Dark Thirty received a Best Picture nomination but the Best Director category once again featured an entirely male and predominantly white selection of nominees (Ang Lee was the only non-white director, nominated for Life of Pi). It is unquestionable that membership in the Academy is severely lacking in diversity. Last winter, the L.A. Times published the results of a diversity study in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences indicating that Oscar voters are 94% white and 77% male. This obviously raises a number of questions, including:
To what extent does the dominant demographic of voters influence the number of white guys nominated for Oscars?
And how does continually awarding Oscars to predominantly white male artists influence the perception of directors who are not part of this demographic?
And how does the celebration of renowned white male directors perpetuate the lack of diversity on Hollywood screens?
Women and Hollywood blogger Melissa Silverstein suggests that there may be a correlation between Bigalow’s being awarded Best Director for The Hurt Locker in 2010 and the fact that the movie featured a male protagonist. The leading character in Zero Dark Thirty is a woman – perhaps less relatable to the overwhelmingly male voters?
Canadian Critics
Although our recent report, Women in View on Screen, showed a lack of female Canadian directors, Sarah Polley recently received the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award (and the prize of $100,000) for her documentary Stories We Tell. The recipient of this award is determined by the Toronto Film Critics Association and I was eager to see if the membership of the TFCA showed a proportionally higher representation of women than the Academy. Not really. Of the 39 members of the TFCA, just over 25% are women. Out of curiosity, I also looked into the diversity of membership at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle and found that one third of the 18 members are female (with some overlap with the TFCA). The VFCC also named Zero Dark Thirty Best Film and none other than Kathryn Bigalow as Best Director. While we have yet to conduct a significant study on the possibility of a correlation between the gender of nominators and nominees, it is definitely something to think
about.
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