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Post by quetee on Jan 14, 2020 18:39:29 GMT
Just keep directing. This question should really be addressed to the director's branch. They are the ones with the issue.
My guess is the same one as it is for race ..if the story is female centric the male majority may not be able to relate to it. I think now if a female wants the nod then they have to be put on blast.
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Post by pupdurcs on Jan 14, 2020 18:41:27 GMT
Just keep directing. This question should really be addressed to the director's branch. They are the ones with the issue. My guess is the same one as it is for race ..if the story is female centric the male majority may not be able to relate to it. I think now if a female wants the nod then they have to be put on blast. Back to unconscious bias then. Women directors are basically fucked. For now.
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Post by quetee on Jan 14, 2020 18:42:34 GMT
With Gerwig, I think it was timing, if the film had been release earlier. It's obviously harder to generate pre-release buzz with a remake. With it's box office, it is appealing to the mainstream. And it is a film with a known cast. It did end up with 6 nods, including Best Picture. But it's a short Oscar season. if cooper couldn't get one then why would she get one?
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Post by quetee on Jan 14, 2020 18:45:13 GMT
Just keep directing. This question should really be addressed to the director's branch. They are the ones with the issue. My guess is the same one as it is for race ..if the story is female centric the male majority may not be able to relate to it. I think now if a female wants the nod then they have to be put on blast. Back to unconscious bias then. Women directors are basically fucked. For now. what else could it be then. The branch is what 99.99% male? Look at the picture that won director for female. It was male related.
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Post by pupdurcs on Jan 14, 2020 18:50:58 GMT
Back to unconscious bias then. Women directors are basically fucked. For now. what else could it be then. The branch is what 99.99% male? Look at the picture that won director for female. It was male related. Yeah, Bigelow seemed easier for male directors to appreciate, as her subject matter and approach skewed heavily masculine for Hurt Locker (and for many of her films to be fair) . Not a knock on Bigelow who is an incrediblely talented director...I think that muscular, male friendly filmmaking style comes naturally to her, but it won't be what many female directors are interested in and their approach needs to be equally appreciated.
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Post by quetee on Jan 14, 2020 18:57:55 GMT
what else could it be then. The branch is what 99.99% male? Look at the picture that won director for female. It was male related. Yeah, Bigelow seemed easier for male directors to appreciate, as her subject matter and approach skewed heavily masculine for Hurt Locker (and for many of her films to be fair) . Not a knock on Bigelow who is an incrediblely talented director...I think that muscular, male friendly filmmaking style comes naturally to her, but it won't be what many female directors are interested in and their approach needs to be equally appreciated. exactly.
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Zeb31
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Post by Zeb31 on Jan 17, 2020 23:03:54 GMT
Let me revive this discussion for a second because I finally have the time to sit down and write a proper (meaning, long as fuck) response to your question. First, the problem with having one specific woman to point to and call snubbed is that that invariably allows for the discussion to be hijacked and derailed. The conversation then becomes about whether or not that one specific woman deserved a nomination, and that's missing the forest for the trees; "I didn't like Little Women" is not a response to the broader debate about female filmmakers not getting recognized, it's a misdirection. Second, about quotas, I'm gonna disagree with what most have said here, because that definitely gets thrown around a lot. Maybe Coppola and Bigelow didn't have people discrediting their accomplishments by attributing it to quotas, and maybe you guys don't recall Gerwig getting that kind of talk back when she was nodded for Lady Bird (though I definitely do), but that type of thinking absolutely does manifest in our prognosticating, and quite often too. Every year there's plenty of "the Academy is all about making themselves look good, so of course they're gonna nominate (minority) to appear progressive and woke", which is basically the same thing. (Obviously this isn't to say that you're sexist or bigoted for pondering how the political climate and trends like MeToo are going to impact the season; there's nothing wrong with that at all, in fact we should do that if we want to be accurate and thorough in our predictions. But " (acclaimed woman/POC) is only getting nominated because of identity politics" is not the same thing as that, and it does happen quite often.) But anyways. You can look at individual cases and find individual reasons why each film was snubbed (A24 has dropped the ball these past couple of years and didn't campaign for The Farewell; Hustlers was a September release and STX isn't the best studio out there; Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a foreign language drama without any names that are familiar to the Academy either in front of or behind the camera, and Neon put all their eggs in the Parasite basket; Little Women has been adapted a million times already, wasn't Sony's priority, and maybe wasn't widely seen in time), and I very much agree with Stephen that having solid studio support is paramount (heh). I won't dispute that. But when we're talking about a total of 5 Directing nominations and 1 win going to women in the Academy's entire 92-year history, then surely there must be more to it than that. So I find the talk about female-directed titles lacking merit and quality to be completely missing the point and skirting the true question to be answered here. Anyone who takes an interest in awards prognostication knows that it's never as simple as that, and that there are countless outside factors with zero connection to quality shaping the race and playing a role in deciding which contenders get how far. To say "aw well, what can ya do if the best, most acclaimed and most zeitgeist-y films of the year just happen to ALL be directed by men!" is naively assuming that whether a film is good is the only factor taken into consideration by these awards bodies. It isn't, and we all know better than to pretend it is for convenience's sake. We spend the entire year getting down to the details of whether each contender has a good enough studio, release date, box-office performance, subject matter, cast and crew, campaign narrative and campaign funds; we all know that, say, Jojo Rabbit is gonna do better than, say, Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Oscars even though the latter is almost universally acknowledged by people who've seen both to be the better film. So I don't see why we should do a 180° here, take the easy way out and use merit as an argument in discussions about race and gender when we do the opposite of that in every single other thread. The truth is that awards groups have their favorites, and they have very clear types of films that they gravitate towards. That's very obvious, and it's precisely because it's obvious that we can predict this stuff with so much accuracy before the first industry nominations have even been announced. The fact that these groups are so easy to read is the reason why we all spend so much fucking time debating on whether one group of random strangers named "the Directing branch of the Academy" is more or less likely to vote for Todd Phillips than a different group of random strangers named "the Directors Guild of America". There are films that voters will automatically pay attention to because they tick the right boxes, or because they happen to have been made by the right people, and the reason why we can predict that so accurately is because the patterns are easily discernible. Look at this year's nominees. Every single one of Scorsese’s non-documentary features this century has been nominated for Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars, with only two exceptions: one February release that didn’t get an awards push, and one that was finished so late in the year that hardly anyone even watched it in time (and even then it still managed a tech nod, meaning that only 1 – one – Scorsese joint has gone completely ignored since the turn of the century). Same with Tarantino: Hollywood is bound to become his 4th Oscar-winning project in a row and 5th overall. Even when his work was generally perceived to be disappointing ( The Hateful Eight got considerably weaker reviews than the rest of his output over the past 11 years), they still paid enough attention to it to give it a win. Sam Mendes' name isn’t the first to come to mind when we talk about guaranteed awards magnets, but he is a previous winner himself, 4 of his first 7 features won Oscars, and 1917 is assured to make that 5 out of 8. Add to that the pull of the cast, crew and subject matter (a World War I drama by Sam Mendes, shot by Roger Deakins and scored by Thomas Newman, edited to look like one/two unbroken shots à la Birdman) and you have perfect Oscar catnip right there. That isn’t to say that those guys don't deserve their accolades; it’s simply that all eyes were already on them in the first place due to the fact that they all fit the traditional Oscar mold and are already in. They didn't have to contend with the barriers of anonymity or nicheness; all they had to do was deliver well-received projects, because their prestige already ensured that voters would give them a shot and check out what they'd cooked up this time. The second their films were announced, we were already posting and blogging and tweeting about them as threats to keep an eye on. In that regard, as much as I dislike Joker, I'll be the first to recognize that Todd Phillips and Bong Joon-ho are clear exceptions here, in that these two men were never "in the club" (so to speak) the same way that Scorsese, Tarantino and Mendes were. They muscled their way to a combined 17 nominations by virtue of making films that strongly resonated with audiences and voters. Joker was a behemoth billion-dollar grosser, and not only did Parasite get the best reviews of the year and sweep a fair share of critics prizes, it also made considerably more money than most foreign language titles usually get to ($26 million domestically and counting). So there you have it: each year you get a combination of award groups favorites that have easier access to a seat at the table, and outsiders who manage to break through by dominating the conversation in an inescapable way. There are occasional seasons in which that balance is shaken up and the pendulum swings harder one way than the other, but it's always a combination of the two (see 2012, with Zeitlin and Haneke coming out of nowhere, but also Spielberg, Lee and O. Russell making it in right beside them). And this is where we swing the conversation back to female filmmakers: there are no women in the former group. There are no women whose status in the Academy is comparable to a Scorsese, Tarantino, Spielberg, Coen, Eastwood, Cameron, or even PTA, Wes Anderson, Iñárritu or Cuarón. You can't point out any female filmmaker whose involvement in a project is enough to assure that awards groups will pay attention to it and nominate it for the top two categories, which you absolutely can with men. For a second there it looked like Bigelow was heading down that track and joining those ranks after making history with The Hurt Locker, but then Zero Dark Thirty underperformed (it's telling that even in a year when the Directing branch made so many inspired choices they still defaulted to O. Russell over her, and the success of American Hustle the following year further proves just how much more of a favorite he was for them at that point than Bigelow) and Detroit got nothing nowhere from anybody. Again: you can give me reasons for both of those occurrences (Bigelow's snub for ZD30 was very much a statistical anomaly, and the film was plagued by the torture controversy that hurt it in the home stretch, whereas Annapurna was still starting out in 2017 and Detroit flopped commercially), but the fact remains that Bigelow fits right in with the broader tendencies. Gerwig's trajectory matches hers quite neatly so far: one huge breakthrough that lands her Picture and Directing nominations, followed by a project that got basically as much acclaim as the previous one ( The Hurt Locker and ZD30 both sit at 95 on Metacritic, while Lady Bird is at 94 and Little Women at 91) but saw her getting left out of the Directing category even as the film picked up Picture, acting and Screenplay nods. Also consider that while five women have been nominated for Best Director in the Academy's history, none of them have managed to get nominated for that prize twice, at least so far. Wertmüller, Campion and Coppola (all three of whom are also screenwriters) never got nominated again in any category for any film after Seven Beauties, The Piano and Lost in Translation, whereas Bigelow and Gerwig did manage to get other nominations (for producing and writing, respectively) but were nevertheless left out of Best Director as their follow-up efforts were generally regarded as underperformers. That means that not even actually winning Oscars (which Campion, Coppola and Bigelow all have, and Gerwig very well might next month) is enough to make them true household names the way that even some men who are zero-time winners are. So LaraQ has the right answer: in order to be nominated, female filmmakers need to deliver projects so beloved, so flat-out raved and inescapable, that the sheer hyperbole makes them a priority for voters. It's just that simple. Awards bodies need that extra boost of "this is the greatest thing since sliced bread" to convince them to pop in those screeners, in a way that they just don't for the group of male directors who are already in their best graces. You can also expand on this conclusion and apply it to non-white filmmakers as well. 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight can take their seasons by storm and make Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins both Oscar winners, but then Widows gets entirely shut out and If Beale Street Could Talk never gains serious Picture/Director traction despite earning rave reviews and being the TIFF Audience Award runner-up. Of course there are exceptions like Ang Lee and Iñárritu, meaning there isn't a perfect 1:1 correlation to women's numbers, but the parallel is strong enough to be worth a mention here. If we analyze the trajectories of filmmakers who had major Oscar breakouts over the past decade, then it's clear that directors who are white and male generally get to "Academy darling" or "people to pay attention to" status much quicker and (most importantly) sustain it for longer periods of time than their female and/or non-white counterparts. David O. Russell managed to have 3 films in a row get in for Picture, Director and Screenplay, and even Joy (which sent him into a hiatus he's only now about to get out of) got an acting nod; Tom Hooper had three Oscar-winning films in a row, two of which were in the low 60s on Metacritic, and it took fucking Cats to break his streak; the Academy took so fondly to Adam McKay's shtick that even Vice (which was so divisive and derided Annapurna deliberately kept it embargoed as late as they possibly could) managed 8 nods including fucking Sam Rockwell doing nothing; and even though First Man (undeservedly) stumbled, Damien Chazelle's last three films still won a combined 10 Oscars. Looking at the numbers and comparing the trends actually makes the whole merit/zeitgeist argument stand out even more. People like Bigelow, Gerwig, Jenkins, McQueen, Céline Sciamma, Lulu Wang, Ava DuVernay, Marielle Heller, Debra Granik etc. are getting snubbed for films with raves (high 80s/90s on Metacritic) and solid box-office returns, while Green Book waltzes its way to Best Picture and the likes of Vice and The Danish Girl pick up wins with no problem at all. We're yet to see women get very far with such middling receptions.
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Post by futuretrunks on Jan 17, 2020 23:45:14 GMT
I think you're not making enough out of the fact that there have been zero female directors with both commercial and critical clout on any consistent basis. That is probably the single biggest obstacle. QT has been making hits since 1992, is a pop culturally iconic figure, and only just received his third directing nomination.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 18, 2020 0:23:48 GMT
be right back, I'm gonna need to do a coffee & snacks run before attempting to read Zeb's essay.
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Post by morton on Jan 18, 2020 0:39:17 GMT
If we analyze the trajectories of filmmakers who had major Oscar breakouts over the past decade, then it's clear that directors who are white and male generally get to "Academy darling" or "people to pay attention to" status much quicker and (most importantly) sustain it for longer periods of time than their female and/or non-white counterparts. David O. Russell managed to have 3 films in a row get in for Picture, Director and Screenplay, and even Joy (which sent him into a hiatus he's only now about to get out of) got an acting nod; Tom Hooper had three Oscar-winning films in a row, two of which were in the low 60s on Metacritic, and it took fucking Cats to break his streak; the Academy took so fondly to Adam McKay's shtick that even Vice (which was so divisive and derided Annapurna deliberately kept it embargoed as late as they possibly could) managed 8 nods including fucking Sam Rockwell doing nothing; and even though First Man (undeservedly) stumbled, Damien Chazelle's last three films still won a combined 10 Oscars. Excellent post. White men certainly get to be "Academy darlings" a lot easier than women or MOC do. Look how long Stephen Daldry hung on as an "Academy darling" even with mixed or rotten films like The Reader and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Rob Marshall is also sort of in the same boat in that while he was only nominated once, his movies continue to rack up a lot of Oscar nominations. Now it's likely because he was nominated, then he then gets chosen to make these type of films that appeal to Oscar. However, it's still almost impossible then for a woman or MOC to breakthrough because they don't get as many chances to helm big projects, and even when they do if it fails, that's their last chance unlike their white male counterparts who will get to fail upwards. (Not related to the Oscars, but just the industry as a whole like where Chris Terrio did terrible damage to one film franchise with his Batman vs. Superman and Justice League movies, and then he gets a chance to wreck another huge franchise with Star Wars, which he does. Of course, he'll still have no problem getting big jobs though in the future.) Anyhow, once these men breakthrough, then it just becomes easier and easier for them to continue to get more and more big projects whereas women or MOC can continue to be struggling for that breakthrough or fighting for that next project. Like if you look at Spike Lee's career. Yes he did get an Honorary Oscar, although if it weren't for #OscarsSoWhite that probably wouldn't have happened, but he first he does Do the Right Thing, which gets a lot of traction, but is snubbed for the most part. Then he makes the more conventional Malcolm X in that it's a biopic which generally voters rotate towards, but again he doesn't get any traction except for a few nominations. Finally he does BlacKkKlansman, and if AMPAS wanted to go for a film about race relations in America, they could have went with it over Green Book because it had better reviews, and the optics would have been a lot better. I know he did win Best Adapted Screenplay, but I think he was just fortunate because of what was going on with the other categories, and that he didn't have a lot of competition. I was going to bring up John Singleton too, but to be fair there are a lot of white male directors that are one and done with the Academy. I think your post proves though that women and MOC generally have it much tougher to be nominated again for follow-up projects because their films have to be undeniable. Lady Bird has or at least had the record for going the longest at RT with a perfect score, and had one of the biggest producers in Hollywood behind it. It was also Gerwig's directorial debut, at least for most people, so there was the element of surprise there, and there was discourse about how a woman should be nominated. Or like Marielle Heller Can You Ever Forgive Me? has a 98% on RT and a 87 on MC and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is at 95% on RT and 80 on MC, but I doubt she was even top 10 last year for Best Director despite CYEFM? getting two acting nominations and a screenwriting nomination, and this year even with having two successful films in a row, she probably wasn't even top 15. Also just wanted to point out how undeniable a woman basically has to be to be nominated because even Debra Granik, who was nominated for Best Picture before, and Chloe Zhao who both won major critics prizes for their films didn't get any traction at all. The Hurt Locker was the undeniable critics favorite of 2009. Of course, as a few posters have brought up, it was a male centric story and about war. Bigelow had also made lot of action films before. Lost in Translation was the undeniable critics favorite of 2003. I also think that it helped that Coppola came from a famous family in the industry, and Bill Murray was a critics favorite too. Focus was also the big up and coming indie studio that had had success their first year with The Pianist and Far From Heaven, and Lost in Translation was one of their big pushes. The Piano won the Palme d'Or, and also had Harvey behind it. Holly Hunter also had a banner year with The Firm where she had a scene stealing role, and on HBO with The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. Finally I just wanted to add that as a prognosticator, I admit that I'm looking for the next "Academy darling", that generally but not always will be a white guy, for my predictions for what might win Best Picture, or who will finally breakthrough. Like this year, even though he had been nominated before, I had a feeling that it was Noah Baumbach's time similar to Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater before him. Or just a short time ago, I that Spotlight might break out because of the subject matter and because McCarthy also fit that mold of a potential "Academy darling" imo. For next year, maybe Judd Apatow will be that. I don't trust his film going to SXSW because I don't think any film that debuted there has ever done that much at the Oscars, but he he seems like he could be a McKay/Farrelly type. Or Mike Mills who has been nominated in screenwriting before, but feels like he could be one of the next "Academy darlings".
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Post by Zeb31 on Jan 18, 2020 1:05:48 GMT
I think you're not making enough out of the fact that there have been zero female directors with both commercial and critical clout on any consistent basis. That is probably the single biggest obstacle. QT has been making hits since 1992, is a pop culturally iconic figure, and only just received his third directing nomination. My issue with that is threefold. First, that goes back to what Stephen pointed out about studio support. It was only in the past few years that the discussion about the lack of opportunities for female and non-white directors really became mainstream and we began to see strides being made towards raising the percentage of films directed by people other than white dudes. How many women over the past few decades have even had the opportunity to make as many films that reach wide audiences as Tarantino? How many female or non-white writer-directors have had consistent access to big budgets and creative control to assert their visions and craft singular bodies of work with mass appeal the way that he has? Only 9 women have ever been granted budgets of $100M and above, and Bigelow and the Wachowski sisters are the only ones among them who were directing original live-action screenplays and not animated films, Disney remakes or Marvel/DC sequels. Meanwhile, Inglourious Basterds, Django and OUATIH are all original stories, all hyperviolent with hard R ratings, all clocking in between 155-165 minutes, and they were all granted budgets between $70M and $100M. We just got a report that Tenet's budget is well past $200M at this point, and that too is an original script that WB is going all in on. Which is fucking great and I'm very thankful for in these franchise-dominated times, but is not something that you can say about any female or non-white filmmaker in Hollywood, really, which prevents any of them from ever reaching the same popular status. If we bring the budgets way down then there's Spike Lee, who seems to me to be well-known even among people who aren't hardcore cinephiles, but Lee uses his platform to make films about communities and subjects whose very nature render too explosive and provocative to be mass-consumed the way a Tarantino, Nolan or Spielberg flick is (which also explains why it took so long for him to win a competitive Oscar). He's well-known and respected, but doesn't attract the same casual following as those guys because he's not as cool or easily digestible, nor as interested in making movies that conform to what casual moviegoers expect to see in crowd pleasers. Second, having both commercial and critical clout hasn't really been necessary to make a filmmaker an Academy favorite lately, especially not with the one branch who's shown the most inclination to thinking outside the box and nominating out-of-left-field and arthouse candidates. It certainly helps and there are multiple examples to prove it, but it's not a necessity. If that were the case, we would've seen Cooper and Coogler getting in at the expense of McKay, Pawlikowski and Lanthimos, for example. And finally, there actually were female-directed movies this year with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and Gerwig's is one of them. Up until yesterday, Little Women had made $78 million domestically through only three weeks of release and was still at #4 in the US, meaning it's easily cracking $100M. Hustlers made $104 million and has the same Metacritic score as 1917. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was released a full month AFTER Jojo Rabbit but has so far grossed 2.7x as much domestically ($60 million vs. $22 million), in addition to being 22 points above it on MC. Even The Farewell, which is largely in a foreign language and had no awards buzz to help it when it was in theaters, is only $5M short of 6-time nominee Jojo Rabbit. I get your point that Gerwig, Scarfaria, Heller and Wang aren't household names with general audiences so they themselves weren't the draws motivating their films' success, but still.
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Post by Ryan_MYeah on Jan 18, 2020 1:07:12 GMT
be right back, I'm gonna need to do a coffee & snacks run before attempting to read Zeb's essay. Forget LOTR. These are the literature epics I live for.
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Zeb31
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Post by Zeb31 on Jan 18, 2020 1:10:04 GMT
be right back, I'm gonna need to do a coffee & snacks run before attempting to read Zeb's essay. If it's under 4,000 words, then what even is the point, y'know. This isn't fucking Twitter. I'm sorry, I really am. I only realize how much I've written once I'm done. I would've deleted that gigantic Joker write-up but my anger at potentially wasting that much time and effort without having anything to show for it surpassed my embarrassment.
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Post by Ryan_MYeah on Jan 18, 2020 1:13:19 GMT
be right back, I'm gonna need to do a coffee & snacks run before attempting to read Zeb's essay. If it's under 4,000 words, then what even is the point, y'know. This isn't fucking Twitter. I'm sorry, I really am. I only realize how much I've written once I'm done. I would've deleted that gigantic Joker write-up but my anger at potentially wasting that much time and effort without having anything to show for it surpassed my embarrassment. Speaking of which, I’m still waiting for that Cats hot take.
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Post by futuretrunks on Jan 18, 2020 1:23:55 GMT
I think you're not making enough out of the fact that there have been zero female directors with both commercial and critical clout on any consistent basis. That is probably the single biggest obstacle. QT has been making hits since 1992, is a pop culturally iconic figure, and only just received his third directing nomination. My issue with that is threefold. First, that goes back to what Stephen pointed out about studio support. It was only in the past few years that the discussion about the lack of opportunities for female and non-white directors really became mainstream and we began to see strides being made towards raising the percentage of films directed by people other than white dudes. How many women over the past few decades have even had the opportunity to make as many films that reach wide audiences as Tarantino? How many female or non-white writer-directors have had consistent access to big budgets and creative control to assert their visions and craft singular bodies of work with mass appeal the way that he has? Only 9 women have ever been granted budgets of $100M and above, and Bigelow and the Wachowski sisters are the only ones among them who were directing original live-action screenplays and not animated films, Disney remakes or Marvel/DC sequels. Meanwhile, Inglourious Basterds, Django and OUATIH are all original stories, all hyperviolent with hard R ratings, all clocking in between 155-165 minutes, and they were all granted budgets between $70M and $100M. We just got a report that Tenet's budget is well past $200M at this point, and that too is an original script that WB is going all in on. Which is fucking great and I'm very thankful for in these franchise-dominated times, but is not something that you can say about any female or non-white filmmaker in Hollywood, really, which prevents any of them from ever reaching the same popular status. If we bring the budgets way down then there's Spike Lee, who seems to me to be well-known even among people who aren't hardcore cinephiles, but Lee uses his platform to make films about communities and subjects whose very nature render too explosive and provocative to be mass-consumed the way a Tarantino, Nolan or Spielberg flick is (which also explains why it took so long for him to win a competitive Oscar). He's well-known and respected, but doesn't attract the same casual following as those guys because he's not as cool or easily digestible, nor as interested in making movies that conform to what casual moviegoers expect to see in crowd pleasers. Second, having both commercial and critical clout hasn't really been necessary to make a filmmaker an Academy favorite lately, especially not with the one branch who's shown the most inclination to thinking outside the box and nominating out-of-left-field and arthouse candidates. It certainly helps and there are multiple examples to prove it, but it's not a necessity. If that were the case, we would've seen Cooper and Coogler getting in at the expense of McKay, Pawlikowski and Lanthimos, for example. And finally, there actually were female-directed movies this year with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and Gerwig's is one of them. Up until yesterday, Little Women had made $78 million domestically through only three weeks of release and was still at #4 in the US, meaning it's easily cracking $100M. Hustlers made $104 million and has the same Metacritic score as 1917. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was released a full month AFTER Jojo Rabbit but has so far grossed 2.7x as much domestically ($60 million vs. $22 million). Even The Farewell, which is largely in a foreign language and had no awards buzz to help it when it was in theaters, is only $5M short of 6-time nominee Jojo Rabbit. I get your point that Gerwig, Scarfaria, Heller and Wang aren't household names with general audiences so they themselves weren't the draws motivating their films' success, but still. Fair enough, I'm not really in disagreement with you. I think Joker (and the rest of the nominees, frankly) getting a director nomination over Little Women is a travesty (yes, I think LW is better than Parasite, easily). I just don't know how female directors are going to routinely be in the discussion in this category without more women being habitual successes.
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Post by Zeb31 on Jan 18, 2020 1:46:01 GMT
White men certainly get to be "Academy darlings" a lot easier than women or MOC do. Look how long Stephen Daldry hung on as an "Academy darling" even with mixed or rotten films like The Reader and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Rob Marshall is also sort of in the same boat in that while he was only nominated once, his movies continue to rack up a lot of Oscar nominations. Now it's likely because he was nominated, then he then gets chosen to make these type of films that appeal to Oscar. However, it's still almost impossible then for a woman or MOC to breakthrough because they don't get as many chances to helm big projects, and even when they do if it fails, that's their last chance unlike their white male counterparts who will get to fail upwards. (Not related to the Oscars, but just the industry as a whole like where Chris Terrio did terrible damage to one film franchise with his Batman vs. Superman and Justice League movies, and then he gets a chance to wreck another huge franchise with Star Wars, which he does. Of course, he'll still have no problem getting big jobs though in the future.) Anyhow, once these men breakthrough, then it just becomes easier and easier for them to continue to get more and more big projects whereas women or MOC can continue to be struggling for that breakthrough or fighting for that next project. I was actually gonna bring up Daldry too, but my post was already long enough so I didn't. He and Terrio are both great examples. True equality is gonna be achieved the day that a woman can direct a film to a 46 on MC, have 5% of the Academy unequivocally say "this is the best motion picture of the year right here, son", and not have that chalked up to her gender or to filling a quota. So in other words, never.
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Zeb31
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Bernardo is not believing que vous êtes come to bing bing avec nous
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Post by Zeb31 on Jan 18, 2020 1:52:01 GMT
Fair enough, I'm not really in disagreement with you. I think Joker (and the rest of the nominees, frankly) getting a director nomination over Little Women is a travesty (yes, I think LW is better than Parasite, easily). I just don't know how female directors are going to routinely be in the discussion in this category without more women being habitual successes. I don't think there's anything that can be done specifically to make women household names, you can't force that to happen. It's like quetee said, the solution is to just keep at it, keep working and not care about awards, because ultimately this recent rise in female and non-white representation is more valuable than making an Oscar lineup. The more opportunities women get, the more worthwhile stories with interesting perspectives get told, which allows for more breakouts like Gerwig and Bigelow.
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morton
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Post by morton on Jan 18, 2020 2:17:29 GMT
be right back, I'm gonna need to do a coffee & snacks run before attempting to read Zeb's essay. If it's under 4,000 words, then what even is the point, y'know. This isn't fucking Twitter. I'm sorry, I really am. I only realize how much I've written once I'm done. I would've deleted that gigantic Joker write-up but my anger at potentially wasting that much time and effort without having anything to show for it surpassed my embarrassment. lol, it's okay I know I just ramble on most of the time, and I don't even care how long my posts end up being. There was definitely some stream of consciousness going on with my last post in this thread because I kept on thinking of things that upset me. Like I just thought of Catherine Hardwicke who did have a huge movie, but they went with 3 men for the other Twilight films. I don't know if they were better, so maybe there was a perfectly valid reason for going with other people, but Hardwicke had some critical/award success with Thirteen. Okay like I understand going with Chris Weitz for the next installment because he did direct a lot of big hits, but I wonder for #3, if Hardwicke was ever considered because it's not like David Slade was some well known director. I thought maybe something similar happened to Sam Taylor-Johnson and the Fifty Shades franchise, but I guess it came down to her disagreeing with the writer of the series E. L. James. Also someone on my timeline just tweeted about watching Aladdin, and while I know that Ritchie has directed some big hits, he also had two flops right before Aladdin, and really I'll never understand why Disney chose him for Aladdin rather than someone from Bollywood since that's obviously what they were going for. Or if they wanted "woke" points they could have gone with a sort of known director in the industry Mira Nair or just anyone that wasn't Ritchie, lol. For me, it could have been directed by anyone, and I don't feel like he elevated the material at all, and I think that if Disney had just hired a female or MOC unknown director, the quality would have been about the same or even better. Dumbo I can understand because Tim Burton did the Alice in Wonderland live action remakes, and he's done several children's films. The Lion King makes sense because Jon Favreau just had The Jungle Book, and is heavily connected to Marvel.
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The-Havok
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Doing pretty good so far
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Post by The-Havok on Jan 18, 2020 2:22:11 GMT
Make a good movie. It's not like it hasn't happened before.
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morton
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Post by morton on Jan 18, 2020 3:03:51 GMT
Make a good movie. It's not like it hasn't happened before. As other posters have pointed out though even that's not enough. Going by Metacritic's Best Movies of 2019 list, here's their top 10 ranking, along with their MC score and the director's name 1. Parasite (96) - Bong Joon-Ho 2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (95) - Céline Sciamma 3. The Irishman (94) - Martin Scorsese 4. Marriage Story (93) - Noah Baumbach 5. The Souvenir (92) - Joanna Hogg6. Little Women (91) - Greta Gerwig
7. Uncut Gems (89) - Ben and Joshua Safdie 8 For Sama (89) - Edward Watts and Waad Al-Khateab9. The Farewell (89) - Lulu Wang10. Long Day's Journey Into Night (89) - Bi Gan Ford v Ferrari (81), Jojo Rabbit (58), Joker (59), 1917 (79), and OUATIH (83) are not to be found on this list of top 50 films. Obviously critics ratings aren't the end all be all, but several women did make critically acclaimed films, yet only Little Women got any significant traction with major televised award shows and even then it couldn't crack Best Director at AMPAS, BAFTA, DGA, or the Globes. In most of these instances, I can see why they were successful outside of their critics scores. James Mangold has many successes under his belt, and probably came close to a BP and BD nomination with Walk the Line, and Ford v Ferrari was a big crowdpleaser. Jojo Rabbit won the People's Choice Awards TIFF. Joker won the Golden Lion, and Todd Phillips has had success with The Hangover trilogy and other films. 1917 is the technical marvel of the year, and Mendes is a former winner whose had other success with Skyfall and other films. Of course, Tarantino's films usually get recognized for something. I'm not saying that these films aren't good, at least most of them, or that the directors of them don't deserve credit, but it goes beyond just having the "best" film. As other posters have pointed out though, these directors have been able to have more chances than most if not all female directors or MOC directors get to have, and then once these guys are welcomed to the club, it's easier for them to get recognized again.
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Post by therealcomicman117 on Jan 18, 2020 3:34:05 GMT
If it's under 4,000 words, then what even is the point, y'know. This isn't fucking Twitter. I'm sorry, I really am. I only realize how much I've written once I'm done. I would've deleted that gigantic Joker write-up but my anger at potentially wasting that much time and effort without having anything to show for it surpassed my embarrassment. Also someone on my timeline just tweeted about watching Aladdin, and while I know that Ritchie has directed some big hits, he also had two flops right before Aladdin, and really I'll never understand why Disney chose him for Aladdin rather than someone from Bollywood since that's obviously what they were going for. Or if they wanted "woke" points they could have gone with a sort of known director in the industry Mira Nair or just anyone that wasn't Ritchie, lol. For me, it could have been directed by anyone, and I don't feel like he elevated the material at all, and I think that if Disney had just hired a female or MOC unknown director, the quality would have been about the same or even better. Dumbo I can understand because Tim Burton did the Alice in Wonderland live action remakes, and he's done several children's films. The Lion King makes sense because Jon Favreau just had The Jungle Book, and is heavily connected to Marvel. Honestly I get the impression that Guy Ritchie doing Aladdin, was just a random choice from Disney. A supposed "safe director" who they could control, and wouldn't go heavily over budget, and could deliver the film on time. I'm sure he appreciated it, since he had a huge hit after the King Arthur disaster, and it allowed him to continue working for studios, but it would have been nice if Disney had been authentic enough to hire an Indian or Bollywood filmmaker to direct instead. Hiring a white guy was never a great look for the studio.
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Post by Brother Fease on Jan 18, 2020 4:12:02 GMT
And by ‘earn’, I mean that there is absolutely no (ie. zero) talk in the vein of “filling a quota” “only nominated cause she’s a women” “virtue signalling” etc etc. And I know I’m a troll, but I am serious here in that I’d like to hear some thoughts. So Greta Gerwig was not nominated, but I did hear a lot of talk about her not actually earning it had she been. It’s a critical success, box office success etc etc. So why would her nomination be questioned like that? What more does she need? It’s fine that some people wouldn’t agree with the nomination, but what about when you disagree with a male best direction nomination? What are the reasons? Is it because you think he was only nominated to fill the male quota? So yeah, what conditions are necessary for a woman to be in the best director contention and there be zero talk of why she was nominated? I am not sure if I understand the premise here. Women have been nominated for Best Director in the past. Bigelow even won back 2010.
The problem here is there are very few women directors out there, making films produced by a major film studio. That's the reality, whether we like it or not.
What happened is very simple: Joon-Ho, Mendes, Scorsese,Tarantino and Phillips got more votes than Gerwig. That's it. No other explanation is necessary. If you looked at the precursor awards, Gerwig wasn't nominated at the BAFTA, DGA or Globes. She was only nominated at the Critics Choice, and they had 7 nominees I believe. Quite frankly, I thought the 5th spot was going to either Phillips or Waititi, and I ended up picking Phillips and got it right.
The only reason why people were actually predicting her, foolishly in my view, is because they felt the Academy wanted to avoid being called sexist and would nominate Gerwig simply because she is a woman. That's never how the Academy operates. Quite frankly I will stop watching the Oscars, if they imposed some ridiculous quota system. My feeling here is that you can never please the woke police ever. They will find something wrong with everything, even if it's forward thinking.
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Post by MsMovieStar on Jan 18, 2020 8:10:54 GMT
Oh honey, well sleeping with the Academy doesn't work... and it's quite exhausting. It is probably easier just to make a great movie.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 18, 2020 9:00:01 GMT
The only reason why people were actually predicting her, foolishly in my view, is because they felt the Academy wanted to avoid being called sexist and would nominate Gerwig simply because she is a woman. That's never how the Academy operates. Quite frankly I will stop watching the Oscars, if they imposed some ridiculous quota system. My feeling here is that you can never please the woke police ever. They will find something wrong with everything, even if it's forward thinking.
That's not the only reason people were predicting her. It was one of several factors (though clearly we've overestimated how much the Academy gives a shit about diversity), not the least being Gerwig's directing is extremely showy and she brought a modernized/fresh perspective to a classic story, the film has been building momentum following its Christmas release, and is hugely popular with critics and viewers alike. With the first four slots nailed down shut, Gerwig honestly seemed like a shoo-in.
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Post by Brother Fease on Jan 18, 2020 12:57:20 GMT
The only reason why people were actually predicting her, foolishly in my view, is because they felt the Academy wanted to avoid being called sexist and would nominate Gerwig simply because she is a woman. That's never how the Academy operates. Quite frankly I will stop watching the Oscars, if they imposed some ridiculous quota system. My feeling here is that you can never please the woke police ever. They will find something wrong with everything, even if it's forward thinking.
That's not the only reason people were predicting her. It was one of several factors (though clearly we've overestimated how much the Academy gives a shit about diversity), not the least being Gerwig's directing is extremely showy and she brought a modernized/fresh perspective to a classic story, the film has been building momentum following its Christmas release, and is hugely popular with critics and viewers alike. With the first four slots nailed down shut, Gerwig honestly seemed like a shoo-in. I get that it is/was a well-received film, but nobody should have been shocked it didn't get in.
Lets review:
Phillips was nominated at the Globes and BAFTA. Waititi was up for the DGA.
Joker was nominated at the Globes, PGA and BAFTA. Jojo was nominated at the Globes, PGA, DGA, SAG. Little Women was nominated at the PGA.
Clearly those two were more popular choices than Little Women.
The primary reason for the prediction was the belief that the Academy cares about woke culture and quotas.
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