This month is Women’s History Month, and there are a lot of stories of fabulous women that are not always popularized or shared. Some being the women who have been involved in the directing aspects of film.
The Academy Awards, or the Oscars, are an award show celebrating achievements in film throughout the year. The categories highlight people behind and in front of the camera. The Academy Awards began in 1929, and earlier this month was the 97th annual show. The categories and titles of the awards have changed a bit in the last 97 years, but overall they keep the same premise.
In regards to the category of directing, the first person to ever win the Academy Award was Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven. The most recent person to win was Sean Baker for his film Anora.
It would surprise many readers to know that out of 97 Academy Awards only 3 of the winners for Best Director are women, and they are very recent.
The first woman ever to be nominated was Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties at the 49th Academy Awards; however, Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2010 at the 82nd Academy Awards when she won the Oscar for The Hurt Locker. Eleven years later at the 93rd Academy Awards, Chloé Zhao won Best Director for the film Nomadland, and in 2022 at the 94th Academy Awards Jane Campion won for The Power of the Dog.
A very big assumption is that women have won in the later decades of the Academy Awards because women were not as involved behind the camera when the industry started up, but that is simply not true. In 1909 (20 years before the Academy Awards began) “[w]omen worked as directors, producers, screenwriters, editors, stuntwomen, camerawomen and actresses”. Many women even had and owned their own independent film companies.
In the 20s when movies began to become big business a lot of studios unionized; therefore, many women were not always allowed to work. Dorothy Arznier was a highlight of this time and “was able to achieve success as a female director between the late 1920s and the early 1940s.”
As years went on, studios and films recognized more and more, women’s place in the film industry. In the 80s Sherry Lansing became the first woman president of 20th Century Fox, and if course in 2010s, Kathryn Bigelow “became the fourth woman nominated…[and] Greta Gerwig became the fifth woman nominated for the Best Director Oscar in 2018 for Lady Bird”. Bigelow would then go on to become the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, making history.
Bigelow was against many big names in Hollywood that night, including, James Cameron for Avatar and Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds. Both those films are now extremely talked about, one having a few rides at Disney, and the other being considered one of Tarantino’s masterpieces. Compared to the other two films The Hurt Locker did not do too well in the box office but the film itself is a masterpiece.
The Hurt Locker follows several soldiers assigned to a bomb squad in the second year of the Iraq war as their sergeant recklessly and dangerously handles his job. It stars many household names such as Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Guy Pierce and Ralph Fiennes.
The film is terrifyingly beautiful and Bigelow certainly poured her heart and soul into this work. Her achievements completely collapsed barriers and stereotypes created throughout the film industry, and her intense cinematic vision solidified her place in history as one of the best in directing.