It’s about time.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Last year’s Best Picture category at the Academy Awards could have been summed up almost entirely like this: The extraordinary endeavors of extraordinary men. This wasn’t new, or even surprising. As Slate’s Dan Kois pointed out last year, it doesn’t seem to matter how great an actress’ performance is; unless she’s, say, playing the wife of a famous scientist, it had seemed unlikely that the movie would receive a Best Picture nod. “In the past 20 years, ” he noted, “only 21 movies that primarily tell the stories of women have been nominated for Best Picture, out of 125 movies nominated overall.” The academy’s choice last year to leave out movies such as made that fact painfully evident. The only Best Actress nominee starring in a Best Picture contender was Felicity Jones, for her turn in as the wife of Stephen Hawking.
But this year the academy finally bucked that trend: Though many are understandably upset that it didn’t nominate masterpieces like and (topics for a separate post), three of the eight Best Picture nominees center on women:, , and . Does this mean that the academy is ready to finally take women’s stories seriously?
Maybe. In 2015, there was a bumper crop of great roles from women—from Lily Tomlin in to Bel Powley in to Kristen Wiig in, the awards season was packed with strong contenders for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nominees. Even so, there was no guarantee that these movies would be honored in the night’s biggest category. But on Thursday the academy took its first step toward a more enlightened perspective, instead of once again dismissing these movies as too “domestic.”
