Who’s afraid of a little female body horror? For once, not the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which on Thursday morning finally opened one of the last remaining gilded doors to their annual Oscar nominations, showering love on filmmaker Coralie Fargeat and her”The subject.”
The filmmaker, with only his second filmearned the only slot for a female filmmaker in the Best Director race (along with Sean Baker, Brady Corbet, James Mangold and Jacques Audiard), in addition to reigning the lone female-directed film in the Best Picture race (including “Anora,” The Brutalist”, “A Complete Unknown”, “Dune: Part Two”, “Emilia Pérez”, “I’m Still Here”, “Nickel Boys” and “Guddiga”). Meanwhile, other female filmmakers and their works out not only from the picture and director race, but the entire Oscar nom kit and kaboodle, including Payal Kapadia and her “All We Imagine as Light” and Halina Reijn and her “Babygirl.”
Earlier this monthFargeat told IndieWire at the Golden Globes that she believes horror films fully deserve a level playing field on The Oscars. “I don’t see horror films as different from other films,” she said. “They’re so political. They’re such a great way to say so many things in a very rude way and in a very insensitive way. To me, they should compete on the same level as everything else. I learned to accept who I was as filmmakers, not love to write dialogue, for example, but to express myself in a visual and very visceral way. And that’s when you accept who you are, and then the magic can happen. The best thing I wish for the academy is that it doesn’t exist this the barrier, that every film is considered cinema, which I think it is.”
Meanwhile, in the realm of horror films at the Oscars, only those directed by men have previously been honored in top categories, including William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”), Steven Spielberg (“Jaws”), Jonathan Demme (“The Silence of the Lambs”), M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”), Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan”) and Jordan Peele (“Get Out”).
Despite Fargeat’s historic nominations, much remains the same in the land of Oscars for female filmmakers, especially when it comes to nominating a single woman in the director category.
A quick story, for anyone who needs a little catch-up: 2024 only one female director was nominated in the category (“Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker Justine Triet, who went on to win Best Original Screenplay), after a pair of record-breaking (for very various reasons) years. 2023, not a single one female director was nominated, and to was on the heels of Jane Campion’s record earnings for her ‘The Power of the Dog’ in 2022. That win established her as only the third woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Director, following Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) and Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”).
While the latest USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study doesn’t really show a decline in inclusion, it reveals that progress in finding, raising and hiring non-white male Hollywood directors has plateaued. Of 112 directors analyzed as part of the pool (for the 100 best films of 2024), 13.4 percent or 15 were women, nearly matching 2023’s 12.1 percent. Although there has been progress since 2007when 2.7 percent of board members were women, in 18 years only 6.5 percent of board members were women.
Our own list of studio-backed films from female filmmakers includes just 14 studio films from female directors over the next two years. Let’s hope (and expect) that a new joint from Fargeat will be announced soon to further fill their ranks.
Elsewhere on Oscar nom morning, female filmmakers where nominated in a handful of other categories, including two in Best Adapted Screenplay: French filmmaker Léa Mysius for “Emilia Pérez” (which listed her as one of three additional names “in collaboration with” filmmaker Jacques Audiard) and Joslyn Barnes, who shared screenwriting credit with “Nickel Boys” filmmaker RaMell Ross (she also produced the film). In Best Original Screenplay, “The Brutalist” co-writer Mona Fastvold earned a nomination along with Brady Corbet (her partner in both film and life), in addition to Fargeat also earning a nod for her “Substance” screenplay.
The Best Documentary Feature race includes three films directed by women: Shiori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries,” co-director Rachel Szor’s “No Other Land” (shared with Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham), and co-director Emily Kassie’s “Sugarcane” (shared with Julian Brave NoiseCat).
Unfortunately, both the Best Animated Feature Film and Best International Film categories did not include a single film directed by a woman.
In it The OscarsIn its 96-year history, only eight women have been nominated for Best Director: Lina Wertmüller (1976’s “Seven Beauties”), Sofia Coppola (2003’s “Lost in Translation”), Greta Gerwig (2017’s “Lady Bird”), Emerald Fennell (2020’s “Promising Young Woman”), Bigelow, Zhao, Campion and Triet. “The Power of the Dog” filmmaker is also the only woman to be nominated twice for the honor.
2021 was the first time the Academy handed out nominations to two women in the category, with Zhao on the way on winning both best director (making her only the second woman to win the award, after Bigelow) and best picture for her “Nomadland,” while Fennell took home the statuette for best original screenplay.
Nomination voting for this year’s Oscars ended on January 17, after being pushed back after the Los Angeles wildfires. Final voting will take place February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will air on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC. Emmy-winning late night host Conan O’Brien will host this year’s ceremony for the first time.
