My Mistake—Happy International Women’s Day!

Yesterday, “Contested Terrain” blogger (and my former Guardian Newsweekly colleague) Dan Cohen suggested that awarding the Best Picture Oscar to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker “would be a great way for Hollywood to celebrate … International Women’s Day.” He was referring to the fact that none of the previous Best Pictures was directed by a woman, nor had any woman ever been recognized as Best Director.

Last night, in accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Precious, Mo’nique said, “I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all she had to so that I would not have to.” She was referring to the first Academy Award given to an African-American, which McDaniel received in 1940 for playing Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

My own predictions, based on all that history, were thrillingly off the mark. Handicapping the Oscars in the Indypendent a couple of weeks ago, I said it would be “Avatar all the way,” and added, “Prove me wrong, Academy, Please.”

And just in time for International Women’s Day, the Academy did. I had failed to take into account certain subtleties of Academy Award demographics, to wit, that people in groups that have historically gone unrecognized and un-awarded are more likely to get awards for work that subordinates members of that group.

I've written about this extensively. For example, the first eight Oscars presented to Black actors—from McDaniel’s in 1940 to the historic first presentation of both top acting awards to African-Americans in 2002—were given for performances in movies that were predominantly about white people. In other words, from 1940 through 2002, when Black actors won Academy Awards, it was for playing roles secondary to white people in the cast. Not until 2005, fifty-five years after McDaniel’s Oscar, did a Black actor get an Academy Award for a movie that was actually about African-American life. (The actor was Janie Foxx, playing singer Ray Charles in the biopic Ray.) No movie about Black people has ever gotten the Best Picture Oscar, nor has any by a Black director; indeed, no film by Spike Lee, arguably the country’s most prolific and creative filmmaker, has ever been nominated as Best Picture.

Thus, when I declared that history made Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker an unlikely prospect for the top Oscar, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that it had become one of the most acclaimed films ever made by a woman yet was in no way a “chick flick.” That’s an understatement, of course. The Hurt Locker is a war movie, in which there are almost no women at all—and as such it was, let us say, a little more likely to become the groundbreaking first woman-directed Best Picture. I mean a lot more likely, certainly more than was, say, Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, which is very much a “chick flick.”

None of this is can or should diminish Bigelow’s achievement, which stands on its own, as did McDaniel’s performance in Gone With the Wind. The Hurt Locker is a powerful film (if not, alas, an antiwar film), and Bigelow’s victory brings us closer to the day when a movie by and about a woman may actually be declared the Best Picture of its year. (And she beat out her own ex-husband—James Cameron, director of Avatar, in case you don’t read Hollywood gossip—which may give a little extra frisson of triumph to all the ex-wives out there.)

Happy International Women’s Day, sisters and comrades.

©Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2010