The Strange Case of Kathryn Bigelow

A scene from The Hurt Locker (2008), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Since the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences first started awarding Oscars™ for film excellence in 1927, there have been 324 nominees for Best Director and 85 people have won the award.  On March 7 of last year, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.  She also was the first woman to win the coveted Director's Guild award as Best Director.

She directed The Hurt Locker - the gripping tale of a company of demolition experts on the front lines in Iraq.  There were few female characters in the movie.  It was what Hollywood refers to as an "Action" picture.  In other words, the first woman to win the Best Directing award, won for directing a film a man would usually be called upon to direct. 

Don't get me wrong,  I'm not implying in any way that Bigelow won as any part of a sympathy or movement vote - i.e, she only won because it was finally time to give the benefit of the doubt to the next woman eligible.  I would have voted for her among the five finalists that year.  And you must admit, her win was all the sweeter when she beat out her former husband, James Cameron (is there really an attractive woman left in Hollywood who hasn't been married to James Cameron?), who directed Avatar, that year's champion at the box office.  Art winning over commerce. 

Kathryn Bigelow holds her Oscar™ for directing The Hurt Locker.

Why does Hollywood consider directing such a male-centric position?  Why have there only been four women to even be nominated as Best Director?  (The other women nominated have been Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (one of my all-time favorites).

87 men have been nominated for the Best Director award multiple times, a lucky 18 actually winning 2 or more Oscars™.  No woman has been nominated more than once. 

I mention this because the Director Guild of America announced the results of their annual diversity report last week. 

The DGA analyzed more than 2,600 episodes produced in the 2010-2011 television season from more than 170 scripted television series.  The report showed that women directed only 12% of those episodes.  Eight TV shows didn't have a single woman director the entire season.  And while this study only applied to television, I'm sure the figures for feature films directed by women are even lower.  And if you're a minority woman?  Forget it.  You can share 1% of all episodic TV directing jobs.

I was a film major at a large, Southern California university back in the 1980's, and there were plenty of women in the program back then (I would have guessed 30-40%) - I'm sure those figures are even higher today.

So I think the numbers of women aspiring to be directors are there, and Ms. Bigelow has shown that a woman can excel in the position on a physically demanding action picture, with mostly male actors, in inhospitable conditions (much of The Hurt Locker was shot in Jordan during the middle of the summer).

Hollywood is a tough business for anyone to enter and achieve success, but this male directing domination doesn't extend to the equally important tasks of editing or producing or writing.  Women editors have won the Oscar™ six times in the past 30 years; a woman has been nominated virtually every year during that time.  (By the way, the best way to win an Oscar™ for editing is to work with Martin Scorcese.) 

The figures are about the same for female producer and writer nominees as editors.  The director position stands alone as the final bastion of male dominance in Hollywood.  Studio executives just prefer to have a man in charge of the set.  Even female studio executives.

Kathryn Bigelow directs The Hurt Locker on location in Amman, Jordan.

The Academy Awards are certainly not the definitive judgement in film excellence in a given year (such legendary directors as Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ernest Lubitsch, David Lynch, Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles never won an Oscar™ for Best Director; Tim Burton and Spike Lee have never even been nominated).  They merely honor what's considered to be, usually, the best big budget/studio pictures made in English, mostly by Americans, for any given year.  But I think it's still an excellent barometer of trends in the industry as a whole, something that the recent DGA report certainly backs up for women directors in television.

So if you're raising a young daughter or daughters, and they seem to show an interest in working in film or television; you may want to steer them away from directing, and into editing, producing or writing.

Because if you want to be the one who yells "Action!" or "Cut!" on a set in Hollywood, it's still a Man's world.