The nominations for the 2019 Academy Awards have been announced today and once again there have been no female directors nominated for the award.
There’s been a lot of attention on this issue and many debates about why female directors are being overlooked for the award.
But the focus on directing overshadows the fact that the Academy’s record with regards to female writers is not great either: This year there are only two female writers’ nominated for Screenplay Awards:
Nicole Holofcener (co-nominated with Jeff Whitty) for Can You Ever Forgive Me? for Best Adapted Screenplay; and,
Deborah Davis (co-nominated with Tony McNamara) for The Favourite for Best Original Screenplay.
Davis is the only the 59th woman to be nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Award since its creation in 1940 and if she takes home the Oscar, she will only be 9th woman to win – and the first since 2007.
To put that into perspective, 437 men were nominated for the award in that time and 97 won.
And it’s not getting better: Since 2009 only 9 films out of the 50 nominated for the Best Original Screenplay award have had females writers credited - there have been four years in the last ten when women didn’t receive any nominations for the award.
Why are women’s voices being shut out the Academy Awards? Maybe it’s because if you’re not given the space to tell your story, it can never been recognised or celebrated. Maybe it’s because even if you do get to make that film, the gatekeepers and the tastemakers are unable to see beyond their own experience to appreciate your work.
It’s a vicious circle because awards, especially the Oscars, influence who gets to make what: a nomination alone can change the course of a creative career - meaning that leaving women’s work out of awards mean less women get the chance to make less films.
What films win awards influences what kind of stories are being told – out of those 50 films nominated since 2009, only 11 have female protagonists, meaning the (most straight, mostly white) male narrative continues to dominate Western cinema.
We are ignoring the voices of women. We are ignorning the stories of women.
We are not allowed to be what we are – three billion diverse human beings.
Instead we are reduced to types.
Instead we are filtered through the gaze of male writers. We are reduced to love interests and murder victims.
We are objectified.
And this matters because the stories we tell don’t just reflect our society – they shape our culture and they influence our society. Art imitating Life imitating Art imitating life – it’s an endless loop.
Our culture doesn’t value women’s stories and women voices, because our culture doesn’t value women. It doesn’t respect their talents and their opinions.
Watching Women is a personal project but it is also intensely political.
I am asking you to be aware of who is telling you stories about woman, who is telling you what a woman should be, how those stories are shaping your expectations about how a woman should behave? How men and women should treat each other – what women think/want/feel – how and why women exist in the world.
Who wrote and directed the film? Who’s voice are you listening to?
And if you are only listening to male voices in film, in literature, on TV, in Music, maybe question why that is – and seek out the voices of the women already speaking and insist room is made for the women who are still fighting to speak.