It’s the tail end of January, which means we are approaching the most dreadful time of the year. With every February comes a whole panoply of perils: record-low temperatures, flu season, Valentine’s Day, and—you guessed it— the Academy Awards.
Each year, the Academy manages to orchestrate a mighty PR shitstorm so effective that it leaves us wondering if its ultimate goal is extinction. In 2015, there was the viral Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite that called out the thinly-veiled racism on which the yearly awards show is predicated; in 2017, there was the great announcement mix-up that momentarily crowned La La Land as the year’s best picture over Moonlight; finally, in 2019, we are just weeks away from a host-less show (among other scandals). Why doesn’t anyone want to host the 91st annual Academy Awards? Who knows. One thing for certain, however, is that the Academy seems to be doomed to a Sisyphean existence.
Although the Academy has made (short) strides in regards to the exclusion of basically every person who isn’t white, the number of women nominated in the best director category for this year’s Oscars is the same as it was ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago—a big fat zero. In the past twenty years, there have been just 3 women nominated for best director: Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (2004), Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (2010), and Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird (2018). Furthermore, Kathryn Bigelow remains the only woman in the history of the Academy Awards to take home a bronzy, eight-and-a-half-pound best director statuette. Until more substantial progress is made within the Academy, we’ve decided to use our purchasing power elsewhere, which means watching all the amazing female-directed films that were Academy Awards eligible but were, for whatever reason, ignored entirely.
Every Sunday from now until the ceremony on February 24th, we will be featuring a woman-directed film we thought deserved a best director nod in a new series called “Oscar Snub Sunday.”
Already have a film in mind? Send it along to myranda@entropymag.org with “Oscar Snub” in the subject line and we’ll include it in the next post.
[Featured Image Credit: Vox]
