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Journalism of Courage
For the first time, two women filmmakers have won two major honours at the Oscars, that of Best Director and Best Picture. Jane Campion became the third woman to win Best Director for the brooding Western ‘The Power of the Dog’. Best Picture was won by ‘CODA’, and breaking the tradition of handing over the statuette to the producers, the prize was received by the film’s director Siân Héder.
New Zealand-based Campion also became the first woman to be nominated for Best Director a second time; she had been nominated for ‘The Piano’, but won for Best Original Screenplay in 1994. (Steven Spielberg won Best Director for ‘Schindler’s List’ that year.)
Oscar for women directors
The prize for Campion made it two years in a row for women directors at the Oscars — Chloé Zhao won last year for ‘Nomadland’. The first woman to win Best Director was Kathryn Bigelow, who beat James Cameron (‘Avatar’) and Quentin Tarantino (‘Inglourious Basterds’) for ‘The Hurt Locker’ in 2010. ‘The Hurt Locker’ also won Best Picture that year.
Before Bigelow, only three women directors had been nominated in the category: Lina Wertmüller (‘Seven Beauties’, 1977), Campion (1994), and Sofia Coppola (‘Lost in Translation’, 2004). Three more women (other than Campion) were nominated after that — Greta Gerwig (‘Lady Bird’, 2017), and Emerald Fennell (‘Promising Young Woman’) and Zhao in 2021.
Their styles: Campion and Héder
Campion, who had thus far confined herself to unpeeling the complexities, struggles, frailties and stifled screams of her women protagonists, stepped out of her comfort zone with ‘The Power of the Dog’. Reportedly influenced by the #MeToo campaign, she made sense of male desire, greed, revenge, and violence, and also highlighted the subtext of homosexuality that had remained suppressed in the original novel by Thomas Savage on the film is based.
Héder’s CODA (Child Of Deaf Adult) is a reinterpretation of the 2014 French film ‘La famille Bélier’, written by Victoria Bedos. It is a feel-good film that celebrates the inclusivity of the deaf community, where the girl protagonist chases her musical dream while taking care of a family who may never understand her passion.
Other women at the Oscars
After two years of increased representation of women, only 28 per cent of individual nominations were for women this year, the lowest in three years. According to TheWrap, which tracks the business of entertainment, “65 of the 229 individual nominees from 2022’s crop of nominated films are women, or 28.3%. That’s a decline from last year, when a record 76 of the 235 individual nominees (32.3%) were women, and also a drop from 2020, when 65 of 209 individual nominees were women (31.1%).”
But going beyond the numbers, there were significant successes for women. Besides Campion and Héder, Germaine Franco, the composer for ‘Encanto’, became the first Latina to be nominated in that category. Three of the films nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay — ‘The Power of the Dog’, ‘CODA’ and ‘The Lost Daughter’ — were written by women. In the acting categories, five of the 10 women nominees were first timers, with two of them Kristen Stewart and Ariana DeBose, now identifying as LGBTQ. The number of women on the Board of Governors, who decide on the Oscar winners, has increased from 26 to 31, out of a total 54 members.
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