By Megan Sullivan
Executive Arts Editor
As the 90th annual Academy Award season quickly approaches, it is important to note that this year, the fifth female nominee for best director, Greta Gerwig, will be honored at the ceremony. Gerwig hopes to become the second woman ever to win this award, following Kathryn Bigelow who won in 2010 for her direction of “The Hurt Locker.”
It is hard to believe that in nine decades, with countless movies hitting the theaters each year, only five women have ever been nominated for the Best Director award. With the “Time’s Up” campaign, more attention has been focused on the dangerous conditions women in the entertainment industry work under due to the fear of sexual assault and has subsequently drawn my attention toward the lack of critically acclaimed female directors.
The lack of female nominees raises the question of why this is the case. Are there not enough qualified women for the awards? Or is the toxic atmosphere of Hollywood’s boys club making it very difficult for women to enter the film industry? Women are given less opportunity to direct and therefore the industry is dominated by men. The lack of female leaders in the movie industry is, in my opinion the root of the sexism rampant in Hollywood culture.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Lynda Obst, a Hollywood producer, discussed the difficulty for women in trying to penetrate the male-oriented environment and the dehumanizing nature of Hollywood. Obst details multiple accounts of auditions in which the male studio chiefs dismissed actresses because they found the actress unattractive and “wouldn’t have sex with her,” ignoring her acting abilities. This is an unfortunate reality that is faced by most actresses in Hollywood, with the presence of the so-called “casting couch” in Hollywood.
She details that she and her co-worker, Dawn Steel, “were each thrilled and mortified to be ‘one of the guys.’” However, the two rarely voiced their own opinions or brought attention to situations which offended them as women “for fear that the guys wouldn’t let us back into the inner sanctum,” she tells the New Yorker.
Obst felt silenced by her fear of losing her position and was forced to sacrifice her own femininity in order to continue to fit in with her male counterparts. Women who have entered the sacred boy’s club are constantly forced to belittle one another in fear that if they stand up for one another, they will be kicked from the coveted position, making it even harder for new women to succeed behind the scenes of movies. Her experience is shared by most women working alongside Hollywood’s boy’s club and is evidence of the hostile environment.
Obst also discusses the dangerous environment the boy’s club creates for actresses and expresses her relief that she was never a target of sexual advances, since she had made herself so similar to her male counterparts through her adoption of their language and sexism that she was not viewed as a potential sexual partner. She also talks about the comfort her co-workers felt when working with female directors, producers, and other high-ranking jobs in the movie business. The relief women feel working with other women demonstrates that a strong female presence both on and off screen is necessary in order to make Hollywood a safer environment for all women.
Despite the disturbing accounts of women in the entertainment industry, there are hopes that the Hollywood climate will change in favor of women in the next few years and Greta Gerwig’s nomination for best director for this year’s Academy Awards is a testament to that hope. However in order for change to happen, there must first be a shift in the way that women are received in the jobs behind the scenes of movies. With the increase in female directors, producers, and studio managers, Hollywood will become safer for all women working in the entertainment industry.
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