This year’s nominees for Best Director, one of the two most coveted awards at the Oscars, are breaking the Hollywood mold, and Greta Gerwig, the first woman to be nominated for Best Director in eight years, is leading the charge.
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On Tuesday, Gerwig, whose film “Lady Bird” was also nominated for Best Film, became just the fifth woman to ever be nominated for Best Director in 90 years of the Academy Awards, the Huffington Post reports.
Not only is Gerwig just the fifth woman to be given the honor, she’s also the first since Kathryn Bigelow was nominated for “The Hurt Locker” in 2010 — ending a seven-year streak of all-male nominees.
Bigelow is also the only woman to win the award, according to ThoughtCo.
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“Lady Bird,” which follows a young woman, Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (played by actress Saoirse Ronan), as she navigates the challenges of growing up a young woman in a male-dominated world, is an apt film to win the nomination, and Gerwig, 34, the perfect spokesperson for the #MeToo movement that has wracked Hollywood in the past year.
“I think women tend to focus on stories that men don’t have the privilege of seeing,” Gerwig said on Variety’s “Playback” podcast. “Between Patty Jenkins and Sofia Coppola and Maggie Betts and Kathryn Bigelow and Angelina Jolie — the number of women who are making really interesting films and the desire to shine a spotlight on them and us and women producers and directors and filmmakers and executives, that’s the thing I’m heartened by.”
Despite Gerwig’s nomination, statistics for women in Hollywood remain bleak.
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In 2016, one in three of the top 250 films did not have a single woman in a key behind-the-camera role (director, writer, cinematographer, producer, executive producer, editor), according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Female actors accounted for less than one in three protagonists in major films.
USA Today reports that 88% of films in 2017 were directed by men.
But this is slowly beginning to change. Along with Gerwig, cinematographer Rachel Morrison just became the first-ever woman to be nominated for the Best Cinematography award for her work on the film, “Mudbound.” Two women joined Gerwig in the best original screenplay category, Emily V. Gordon for “The Big Sick” and Vanessa Taylor for “The Shape of Water.”
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