After the Golden Globe nominations were announced on Monday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — the nominating committee — was met with major backlash for failing to nominate a single female director.
Despite a year that included critical acclaim for Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers , Greta Gerwig’s Little Women , Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy , Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart , Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim , and Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , not one received a Golden Globe nod. Adding insult to injury was that several of these films either racked up nominations in other categories or have already been honoured with nominations by other awards organizations.
There wasn’t a single female nominee in the Best Screenwriting category either.
The directing nominees do include Bong Joon-ho for Parasite , Sam Mendes for 1917 , Todd Phillips for Joker , Martin Scorsese for The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time in Hollywoo d.
Har’el was the most outspoken about the news, tweeting, “These are not our people and they do not represent us. Do not look for justice in the awards system. We are building a new world.”
In an interview with Deadline , Stacy Smith, founder and director of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, noted, “For the first time this year, we have seen an increase in hiring of female directors — somewhere between 12 per cent and 14 per cent of the top 100 films this year will have been directed by women. The lack of nominated female directors reflects that the image of a female director, as held by the HFPA, seems to still exclude women from being considered as artists worthy of critical acclaim or awards recognition. … Our cultural institutions need to be held to account when their decision-making does not reflect the world we live in or the changes we have seen in the wider entertainment industry.”
HFPA president Lorenzo Soria blew off the backlash, telling Variety , “What happened is that we don’t vote by gender. We vote by film and accomplishment.”
While voting only by film and accomplishment might sound nice in theory, there’s a disconnect to what’s happening in practice. Despite its claims to the contrary, the HFPA seems to most definitely be deciding by gender. Only five female directors have ever been nominated in the entire history of the committee. Barbra Streisand is the only director to have ever won, for Yentl in 1984.
Last year, while presenting the directing award and in hopes of the tides turning, Natalie Portman pointedly declared, “here are the all-male nominees.”
Someone get her back on that stage.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
