Year after year, the nominees for the category of Best Director in the Academy Awards have been nearly entirely male. In 95 years of the ceremony, only 8 women have been nominated for best director, with only 3 of them winning an Oscar. Out of the 3, only one was a woman of color.
Seeing Chloé Zhao win the Academy Award for Best Director in 2021 was thrilling. I hadn’t seen Nomadland, the film she won the Oscar for, but seeing a woman win in such a male dominated category made me feel hopeful. Two female directors were nominated that year, and I remember thinking of it as progress – it was the first time more than one woman had been nominated for the category – even though female directors were still the minority of nominees.
In 2022, Jane Campion won Best Director for The Power of the Dog, making her the second consecutive female director to win in the category, and the progress I believed was happening when I saw Zhao win in 2021 lived on. That was until 2023, when the nominees for Best Director were all, once again, men.
2022 had many critically acclaimed films by women such as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, Maria Schrader’s She Said and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, which earned Polley the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The nominations for the 2023 ceremony led to great dissatisfaction due to the omission of women’s voices and stories promoted by the Academy through their nomination of exclusively male filmmakers for the category.
The organization Women In Film Los Angeles released a statement criticizing Academy voters in January 2023 following the nominations.
“Once again, Academy voters have shown that they don’t value women’s voices, shutting us out of the Best Director nominations,” they said.
In the statement, they also said the Academy Award is “more than a gold statue, it’s a career accelerator and can lead to continued work and increased compensation” for female directors.
The space for female filmmakers in the film industry is still limited, and the fact that female-produced stories are being overlooked by an institution with such power does not help bring any progress.
In 2022, women made up 24% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films, which represents a decline of 1% from 2021 and an increase of only 7% since 1998, according to research by The Celluloid Ceiling.
Despite the diversifying of the industry in recent years, the progress towards diversity and inclusivity feels severely delayed. The first time a woman won the Academy Award for Best Director was in 2010, 82 years since the beginning of the Oscars. This year, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress.
What does it mean when the award ceremony that represents the highest honor in the film industry does not even consider female directors as deserving of such honor? What has to change for their work to be as acknowledged and praised as their male counterparts?
Other award ceremonies, such as the Golden Globes, have also historically failed to recognize female filmmakers. However, the real issue does not begin on the center stage of these ceremonies, but in the hiring departments, technical schools, and the unwavering stigmas that hold women back, as Matilda Pollard wrote for Strike Magazine Boca.
Pollard wrote that uplifting women trying to break into the film industry requires supporting their projects and advocating for their spaces in the field. Women should not only be recognized for the work they’ve done, but be given opportunities and respect to start their projects in the first place.
Here’s a list of some great movies by female directors released in 2023 that I believe deserve recognition not only in award ceremonies such as the Oscars or the Golden Globes, but among the general film-loving public as well as the film industry:
- Past Lives by Celine Song
- Barbie by Greta Gerwig
- Bottoms by Emma Seligman
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Kelly Fremon Craig
- Rye Lane by Raine Allen-Miller
- Fair Play by Chloe Domont
- Priscilla by Sofia Coppola
- Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet
And here are upcoming movies by female directors to look out for:
- The Marvels by Nia DaCosta (Nov. 10)
- Saltburn by Emerald Fennell (Nov. 22)
- Love Lies Bleeding by Rose Glass (early 2024)