I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched. Greta Gerwig.
I'm writing this midway through January 2020 - a month in which disgraced Hollywood mogul Harney Weinstein attended court for the opening of his rape and sexual assault trial, and in which neither BAFTA nor the Adacemy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences included a women in the Best Director award category. I mention the first of those items as it was the Weinstein business and accompanying #metoo outrage that prompted my first Women and Hollywood feature back in 2017. The predatory behaviour exemplified by the case, I observed, was a nasty symptom of a wider problem - that of how women were systematically marginalised within the movie industry. Which brings me to the second of the above news stories. This pesky awards situation and what it suggests about the position of women in Hollywood 2020.
Look, I'm going to start off by saying it - no awards board is obligated to include anyone in a list based on that person's gender, race or any other aspect of their physical being. Ideally all awards voters make their choices based on merit alone, so that in the Best Director category it's genuinely significant achievements in direction, which get rewarded. This of course begs the question 'Is that what happened this year?' Let's take a look...
BAFTA and the Academy concur on all of their five selections in the directing field. Of those five I've seen all but one - Bong Joon Ho's Parasite. Each of the four I have viewed definitely sits at the high end of the creative scale and by numerous accounts Parasite is a remarkable piece of work also (I'll provide my own thoughts on that as soon as I can). The one female director whose name has been jostling consistently for consideration with those of the boys is Greta Gerwig. Lulu Wang's The Farewell and Alma Har'el's Honey Boy are also highly regarded pieces of direction, but sadly neither movie generated much awards buzz outside of Awkwafina's central performance in the former. Gerwig's Little Women adaptation, meanwhile, is a sublimely crafted film in which the director draws out great individual performances, never losing sight of the ensemble, while creatively restructuring the entire time-frame of the narrative and spinning out themes of youthful hope versus adult disenchantment in the lives of its characters. It's a terrific achievement all round.
So is the movie's omission from various nomination lists indicative of institutionalised sexism within awards bodies? In all honesty I might suspect that, but I can't state it as a concrete fact. Each of the other directors in consideration appears to be a worthy contender, so it's not like Gerwig has been elbowed out by objectively inferior work. That said, with all the bigging-up of Little Women along with its box-office success, you'd expect it to get some nods. There's a subtlety in its style that just possibly got lost on people drawn more to the more openly dazzling Joker or Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood. Maybe the sexism comes in at a level where this female-led period drama isn't perceived as sufficiently 'muscular' subject-wise to be nominated for a prestigious award. That's purely my supposition. Whatever the reason, however, it's a disappointment that Gerwig hasn't received more awards-love this season for her role as director in a beautifully crafted piece of work.
There's a substantially more important point to be made, however, than that regarding the response to a single movie. Struggles over representation of any kind aren't won and lost at awards ceremonies. Oscar/BAFTA/Globes season is just the back-slapping end-point of a long process - an indication of who's getting to head up the prestige projects in a colossal industry. This year's noms are a symptom (as with the Weinstein business), not the core problem itself. You want to see more women and more people of colour nominated for top awards? Then you need a more representative group of people producing and being hired to write screenplays and to direct. You need a broader range of faces on screen in key roles and a greater range of stories being told. And for that to become a self-perpetuating reality, two things are required. Firstly you need encouragement at grass-roots level for people from all corners of society to consider careers in film-making. (Admittedly the publicity generated by more Oscar-nominated women would aid in that.) Secondly - and this continues to prove elusive - you need a system where there's upward mobility in Hollywood and elsewhere for anyone, regardless of gender and race.
The greatest thing that the #MeToo campaign has achieved on a Hollywood industry level is to spotlight how stuck everything had become - specifically the system's institutionalised white maleness dating back to the days of its creation. #MeToo has sped up a process which I believe was already in motion, one where a greater number of determined women within Hollywood were pushing for proper female representation in front of and behind the camera. This process has been responsible (so I argued in a feature at the end of 2018) for a vastly more interesting and varied portrayal of women onscreen than we'd seen a generation before. It's a trend that continued into 2019, a year that began for me with the all-female royal sparring of The Favourite and ended with that splendid adaptation of Little Women, with notable female-centric stories like Booksmart, Late Night and Hustlers along the way. More significent is the fact that the final three of these films were directed by women - Olivia Wilde, Nisha Ganatra and Lorene Scafaria - who are making a serious industry splash.
(Olivia Wilde - Camerasmart)
You see, whatever story this year's awards nominations are telling us, it's one I believe is nearly finished in the telling. A new narrative is being established and 2020 could be a propulsive new chapter. The next twelve months will see a slew of female-directed films on our screens. Some of these are intriguing smaller-scale projects like Eliza Hittman's challenging teen drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Natalie Erika James' supernatural horror The Relic. But a striking number of tentpole studio movies are also being helmed by women, including the greater part of this year's comic-book output.
Patty Jenkins is returning with a sequel to her mightily successful 2018 Wonder Woman adaptation, while the character of Harley Quinn might actually have justice done to her this time around (we could all then forget about 2016's messy Suicide Squad) in Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey. That accounts for the DC Universe. Meanwhile over at Marvel Cate Shortland is taking the reins of the long-anticipated Black Widow standalone film and enticing new MCU property Eternals is in the hands of Chloe Zhao; in both cases the directors are making a leap from relatively small-scale productions to the studio big-time. Disney meanwhile has entrusted one of its more interesting live-action remakes - the colourful and martial-arts-heavy Mulan - to Niki Caro (The Zookeeper's Wife), while Reen Morano is taking time out from directing and actively shooting quality TV work like The Handmaid's Tale to direct mainstream thriller The Rhythm Section. And established TV directors Liesl Tommy and Melina Matsoukas are both delivering feature film debuts - in the form of Aretha Franklin biopic Respect and urban drama Queen and Slim.
(Melina Matsoukas - 2020 a big year for her?)
I could go on for some time, but even listing feels patronising - hey, look what you girls are doing now! The point is that even five years ago I couldn't have created such a list without scratching around in the outer reaches of independent film-making (not that there's anything wrong with those hives of low-budget creativity). These days women are vastly more likely to be found at the heart of the industry penning screeplays, overseeing action on set, even - albeit only occasionally - shouldering a camera. Slowly, inevitably, a revolution has been taking place and it's gaining serious momentum.
(Reed Morana shoulders her responsibility)
So there's considerably more good news here than bad. In the wake of the Weinstein scandel and the rise of #metoo the movie industry's serial harassers-of-women have much less cover under which to operate. Admittedly the male-dominated power structures that allowed for that harassment in the first place, while simultaneously shutting women out of key roles in film-making, are still in the early stages of being dismantled. The scarcity of female nominees at the awards end of the industry in 2020 is a clanging reminder of that, but it's far from the whole picture. Women in Hollywood are on the move and there's a day coming when their lack of representation will no longer be an issue - when that year's 'Little Women' will be shoulder-to-shoulder with other titles directed and produced by women and whether or not one particular film gets recognition simply won't matter so much. And if 2020 is the banner year it promises to be, that day may arrive sooner than we thought.
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