Mind the cinematic gender gap
I am beyond ready for more female-centered stories and recognition of female artistic achievements, thanks!
Dear friends,
So, I just made the mistake of glancing at the Oscar nominee list and (big surprise) I’m mad about it.
Greta Gerwig has directed three films that have landed on the Best Picture nomination list - Barbie, Little Women, Lady Bird - but she somehow didn’t make the cut for a Best Director nomination. Her career makes clear her multifaceted talent, her intelligence, thoughtfulness, and keen aesthetic vision…and the film in question was a record-breaking undeniable global financial and artistic success…but Gerwig was passed over.
That Barbie was nominated for “best adapted screenplay” instead of “original screenplay” seems a snub for the writing, too. Barbie dolls existed first, true, but this story and everything that made the film brilliant and interesting was completely original and the writing deserves high praise.
Given all the constraints and expectations placed on it, the complexity of it, and the result - it’s a magical piece of filmmaking that captures a cultural moment, timely trends and conversations, perfect performances, and a brilliant cocktail of film historical influences and homages.
Reading headlines about how Oppenheimer “leads” the awards season, it’s hard not to feel a hot and simmering rage as every part of me revolts against the predictable snubs of the patriarchy. It’s almost impossible to avoid comparing the two films, entwined as they were in the cultural conversation and indelible marketing moments. We can praise one film’s artistic achievements without denigrating another. Yet I think that’s what’s happening here.
Only one woman was nominated in the Best Director category (Justine Triet, and I believe she deserves it for the excellent Anatomy of a Fall, a film I might write about another day!) and there have only been three female Best Director winners at the Academy Awards - ever!! In the history of this award, it has been given to 74 directors or directing teams. This is an expression of a deep enduring cultural bias against anything that centers women - our interests, our lives, our preferences, our experiences.
I have so many questions. Do we really think there are so few female directors worthy of a Best Director honor? Can a work of art that focuses on female-coded topics (Dolls! Female self-actualization!) ever achieve the same critical acclaim as a work that focuses on male-coded topics (Science! Bombs!)? Did any of the members of the Academy actually understand the point of Barbie?
It seems that, even in 2024, the answer to all these questions is No? And this is a good reason to do what I usually do, and ignore the farce that is the Academy Awards, and watch what you want.
(I’m also mad that Margot Robbie got snubbed but this feels less urgently awful because let’s face it, the correct and only choice for Best Actress is Emma Stone.)
In 2023, I decided to get really intentional about what I put in my brain and choose to read a lot of fiction written by women. I focused on AAPI authors and stories. In 2024 I think I’ll extend that focus to watching more films directed and written by women, and centering women’s stories.
I’ve noticed that once I got used to seeing and hearing my own experiences reflected in art, it was hard and senseless to go back. This doesn’t mean that I need or want all the art I interact with to be “about me” or “for me” - but it does mean that I demand to be considered relevant as part of the audience, and that women’s lives and work be recognized as worthy subjects for serious creative inquiry.
We are each in charge of how we engage. Sometimes I look at creative consumption in terms of numbers: If I will probably read about 40 books and watch about 80 films per year for fun — what will they be?
2023 Reading List: Women’s Voices
In that spirit of intentional engagement, here are a few of my favorite female-centered books from my 2023 reading list. I highly recommend them all and if you want, you can bookmark or buy them all here.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
A poetic and heady work that blends memoir with cultural criticism and theory in the lineage of Sontag. Explores the experience of gender, romance and sexuality, pregnancy and motherhood, and creating a family. I finished this book full to the brim with ideas and emotions and wanted to buy a copy for every mother I know.
Foster by Claire Keegan
A sweet and sad novella about a young girl in rural Ireland who goes to live with foster parents and discovers her first experience of being loved. A quiet and fragile emotional experience of a book.
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
Eight short stories ranging from funny to fully insane with a healthy dose of magical realism, always creative, surprising, and pierced with loneliness.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Everyone’s heard of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War, but what of the scores of innocent women of Troy and neighboring kingdoms who were captured, murdered, and enslaved during this bloody chapter of history? This dark and detailed retelling of Homer’s Illiad takes Greek mythology as a catalyst for exploring the lives of women as collateral damage of this and all wars.
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
Lee hit the bestseller lists for her novel Pachinko, which is superb, but I think I liked this one even better. It’s so dense with detail, rich characters, and deeply evoked emotions, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel. A Korean immigrant twist on The House of Mirth; absolute catnip for lovers of multigenerational literary fiction and novels of manners.
Yellowface by RF Kuang
A sadistically cringe-inducing inquiry into cultural appropriation and the treatment of Asian American artists in America, and a titillating insidery indictment of the publishing industry. Also it’s hilarious.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Two people, a man and a woman, form a complicated friendship that spans decades, during which time they become each others’ most challenging creative motivators and business partners, and sources of pain. A rare and articulate novel of love that isn’t about romance, exactly.
Goldenrod: Poems by Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith has this uncanny ability to slice the simplest words and ideas from daily life and reveal something refreshing, luminous, and new in her poems. I especially appreciate her words about family and motherhood.
The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
A deliciously sly and feminist speculative fiction thriller about a twisted male fantasy and its fallout. A brilliant workaholic scientist learns her husband has been cheating on her — with a clone. I can’t say a single thing more because you deserve to read this unspoiled.
Dress Code by Véronique Hyland
A funny and inquisitive look at the many facets of fashion and how what we wear speaks about our values, socioeconomic class, and our place in history. The essays in this book treat fashion with the seriousness it deserves as an art form and key form of cultural communication.
Side quests
Gender at the Oscars: Of the 13,253 nominees at the Academy Awards® since 1929, 17% were women and 83% were men. The ratio of men to women nominees was 5 to 1. Sixteen percent of all winners across the last 95 years were women. Less than 2% of nominees were women of color. Of all Academy Award® winners, women of color were 2%.
Barbie’s Greta Gerwig Snub Is the Oscars’ Most Depressing: For Gerwig to be left out of the Best Director category specifically seems like the most symbolic way to prove Barbie’s exact point.
It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing U.S. Films of 2022: In 2022, 33% of films featured sole female protagonists, up 2 percentage points from 31% in 2021. The percentage of women in speaking roles increased by 3 percentage points, from 34% in 2021 to 37% in 2022.
The stark reality of how men dominate talking in meetings: In 2017, Prattle studied more than 155,000 company conference calls over the past 19 years in research for Bloomberg, finding that men spoke 92% of the time.
Last thought
“Nobody knows what you have in you until you've done it, so I just keep pushing those boundaries, and I figure it will all come out in the wash.”
—Greta Gerwig