Women made them. Viewers and critics liked them. No one nominated them

Melina Matsoukas, Greta Gerwig and Lulu Wang have been largely left out of the best director conversation. Photos / Samuel Trotter, Jody Rogac and Rozette Rago The New York Times

Despite box office success and critical praise, female filmmakers are largely being left out of Hollywood's awards season.

Elizabeth Cantillon has worked in Hollywood for three decades, first as an executive at Sony Pictures, where she helped steer the James Bond franchise, and now as a producer. In other words, she has seen it all.

But the current Oscar race has left her slack-jawed. Where are the women?

"It's like The Empire Strikes Back, " Cantillon said Tuesday, after female directors and films starring women were largely AWOL. from the list of Golden Globe nominees. The Screen Actors Guild was similarly exclusionary Wednesday, leaving out Greta Gerwig's Little Women and Lulu Wang's The Farewell. Academy Awards handicappers predict that female filmmakers will also be sidelined when Oscar nominations are announced January 13.

Women have come a long way in Hollywood since 2017, when the #MeToo and Time's Up movements swept the culture — maybe so far that the film establishment, still overwhelmingly male, is reflexively trying to throw on the brakes, said Cantillon, who has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2017.

"I think there was all this support for the resistance," she said, "and then they were like 'Whoa, not so fast.' "

For people who share Cantillon's point of view — and there are lots of them in Hollywood, male and female — the lack of traction for female filmmakers this awards season is particularly galling because there are many worthy candidates.

The Farewell, directed and written by Wang, and Olivia Wilde's directorial debut, Booksmart, both received better reviews (as assessed by scores on Rotten Tomatoes) than the three Oscar front-runners: Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers, starring Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez, collected $150 million at the worldwide box office and provided a cogent account of the financial crisis. Queen & Slim, Melina Matsoukas's fugitive thriller, gave us a new leading lady in Jodie Turner-Smith and a new language to discuss the black experience. Little Women, written and directed by Gerwig, is a subversive new take on a classic novel.

Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers collected $150 million at the worldwide box office. Photo / Supplied

They are just a handful of the dozen films from women directors sure to be among the top 100 grossing films of 2019, a 10 per cent uptick from the 12-year norm and a significant improvement from last year's abysmal showing of 3.6 per cent. Frustration over the lack of women in the conversation for best director has been intensified by the sidelining of women in films like The Irishman, which meanders along for 3 1/2 hours but finds little for female characters to do except smoke cigarettes and stare quietly from the sidelines. ("Anna Paquin's line in The Irishman" is a top search term on Google.)

Asked why Margot Robbie had so few lines in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino dismissed the question. Women only exist on the edges in Uncut Gems, which stars Adam Sandler as an adrenaline-fueled diamond dealer. Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood's film about the 1996 Olympics bombing, finds a reporter (played by Wilde) offering sex to an FBI agent in return for information. The car racing drama Ford v Ferrari is the story of two men; The Lighthouse, a black-and-white thriller, is the story of two men; The Two Popes is the story of two men; A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is the story of two men. (Beautiful Day was at least directed by a woman: Marielle Heller.)

"There is a systemic belief that stories about men matter more than stories about women," said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and the producing force behind Little Women. "I don't believe that's true. And I don't believe that makes something more commercial."

Women directors beating back the patriarchy with every defiant frame. Saluting @thumbelulu @almaharel @melinamatsoukas and all the ladies with films in theaters now + those who will come next + those who came before. pic.twitter.com/azwfZO6yBd

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) November 25, 2019

Some are also troubled by the large number of Oscar contenders that feature (white) men lamenting a changing world.

"I'm no longer relevant" (Robert De Niro's assassin in The Irishman). "I'm too old to race cars" (Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari). "I'm a washed-up actor" (Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood). "New York has become a mean place" (Joaquin Phoenix in Joker). "I'm the victim in this divorce" (Adam Driver in Marriage Story).

Is this man-tsunami a manifestation of "male panic — the need to protect one's turf," as Peter Bart, an editor at large for Deadline.com, wondered in a November 23 column?

Every awards season is imperfect in some way — sometimes in multiple ways. (The coming Oscars may recognize a few Asian acting performances but could also feature no black nominees.) And that is not likely to change given the highly unpredictable nature of filmmaking, what gets released when and who makes those decisions.

Sasha Stone, who runs Awards Daily, an entertainment honors site, found herself in the position of defending Globe voters this week. "'Pick a woman, any woman' seems to be the message," she wrote in a column Tuesday. "Many prominent voices refuse to accept the possibility that the five best movies of the year might be directed by men."

But Stacy L. Smith, a University of Southern California professor who has made studying gender bias in media her life's work through the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, sees the situation differently.

"The Golden Globe nominations are a textbook illustration of leadership bias," Smith said. "We have a year where women are critically acclaimed, where they are showing off their box office prowess and where there are more of them so you can't say the talent pool isn't there."

She added, "Women were not considered because the template of what it means to be a leader, or a director, is masculine in nature, and it's about helming male-driven stories."

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is the story of two men, though it was directed by Marielle Heller. Photo / Supplied

Unlike the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the tiny group (88 voting members) behind the Golden Globes, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been actively working to change its demography, Smith noted. The academy has admitted thousands of new members over the last three years, with an emphasis on women and people of color.

But the Oscar voting pool (about 9,000 film professionals) nonetheless remains 68 per cent male and 84 per cent white, according to academy data.

At this point, most of the leading Oscar handicappers — Anne Thompson of Indiewire, Glenn Whipp of The Los Angeles Times, Tim Gray of Variety — are predicting that the academy will put forward an all-male field for best director. Other categories could be similar. The front-runners for adapted screenplay are all men, with the exception of Gerwig, according to Gold Derby, an awards prognostication site. Only two women, Wang and Jin Won Han, who wrote Parasite with Bong Joon Ho, are among the favourites to be nominated for original screenplay.

Cinematography? Score? Male nominees are expected to fill 100 per cent of the slots.

Let the women compete for hair and makeup. Oh, wait: A man is the favorite in that race too. (Kazu Hiro, for his Bombshell prosthetics.)

While the Screen Actors Guild was saluting movies by male filmmakers Wednesday with its nominations, the most powerful women in Hollywood were uniting over coffee and quiche at The Hollywood Reporter's annual Women in Entertainment breakfast.

The unstated theme was sisterhood. The power list is no longer ranked. Honoree Reese Witherspoon proclaimed her relief that her days of being the only woman on a set of a 150 men were thankfully well in her rear view, thanks both to her growing clout as a producer and her realisation that for much of her career she had been siloed from other women. And Wilde, who will direct a comedy for Universal Pictures as her Booksmart follow-up, kicked off the festivities with a rousing speech that name-checked a slew of female filmmakers that inspired her this year, including all of the women mentioned above in addition to Alma Har'el (Honey Boy), Ava DuVernay (When They See Us), Elizabeth Banks (Charlie's Angels) and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (The Mustang).

"Hollywood is cracking open its gates to let us in," she said.

If only the awards institutions would do the same.

Written by: Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes

Photographs by: Rozette Rago, Samuel Trotter and Jody Rogac

© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES