2013 Oscar Week: The Brainy Message of ‘ParaNorman’

Guest post written by Natalie Wilson, originally published at Ms. Magazine. Cross-posted with permission.

Got a thing for zombies? Have some tween-age children in your life? Do you like whizz-bang stop-motion animation? Or, perhaps you are one of those types who appreciates a well-developed cast of characters that kicks stereotypes to the curb, features strong women and – can it be true?!?! – has a positively depicted openly gay character. If so, get thee to a theater and see the little-buzzed-about but much deserving ParaNorman–a zombie film not only with brains but a lot of heart. 

Displaying it’s cleverness and attention to detail with tongue-in-cheek nods to horror films in general and zombie mania in particular, ParaNorman, which opens in wide release Friday, offers a number of sly critiques of cultural norms. Soon after meeting the spiky-haired but soft-hearted Norman and his wise-cracking dead grandma, we meet the dad, who is mocked for his stereotypical views of “limp-wristed hippy garbage” and for berating Norman about his supposed abnormalities.

What makes Norman abnormal, from his conservative father’s viewpoint, is his ability to see and converse with dead people; but what makes him wonderfully better-than-normal is the fact that he resists norms, befriends outcasts (both dead and alive) and says things like: “When people get scared they say and do terrible things” and  “They did something awful. That doesn’t mean you should too.” His insight that making others suffer is not the answer to injustice is a key message of the film, along with the equally important emphasis on doing away with preconceived notions about who is “good” and what is “normal.”

Norman Babcock and his family in ParaNorman | (L-R): Grandma Babcock (Elaine Stritch), Sandra (Leslie Mann), Perry (Jeff Garlin), Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Courtney (Anna Kendrick)

Stereotypical expectations are undercut when the annoying older sister, Courtney, turns out to be Norm’s savior. Her insistence that, “You all need to stop trying to kill my brother. You are adults!” nods to yet another point made in the film: that adults don’t necessarily know better, especially “normal” adults or those with authority, like dads, teachers and cops.

While father figures are usually more heroic in children’s films and mothers are either dead or monsters (or both), this time around it’s Norman’s mother who is the non-monstrous parent. However, both parents take sidelined roles to the standout Scooby-gang that saves the day–Norman, his wonderfully quirky friend Neal, the seemingly typical-jock Mitch, sis Courtney and tormented bully Alvin. All of these characters are stock types, yet by the film’s end each character has disproven stereotypes. Most surprisingly, the uber-muscular “dumb jock” turns out to be gay–revealed by the line “You’re gonna like my boyfriend; he’s like a total chick-flick nut.” With his character and others, the film lures us into believing it’s perpetuating stereotypes only to pull them out from under us.

This undercutting of preconceived notions is also made via the fact that the zombies and witches are not sources of evil: The “average citizens” of Blithe Hollow are. As the citizens turn into a zealous lynch mob, they serve as a metaphor for our own cultural tendencies to shout “terrorist” before we have assessed where the real threat/fear is coming from. In fact, the centuries-old “curse” in the film turns out to be one big misunderstanding (a misunderstanding that those in the know about witches will recognize as a clever nod to the way the categorization of “witch” was wielded to denigrate women and Others perceived as a “danger” to the normal patriarchal way of doing things). Yes, just as in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – but this time in 3D!

Neil (Tucker Albrizzi) and Salma (Hanna Noyes) in ParaNorman

On that note, I must give a shout out to the very smart Salma, a standout secondary character who carries around a book called My First Nuclear Fusion Reactor and asks why witches are always depicted in historically inaccurate ways as hideous with pointy hats. While I wish she had made it into the Scooby-gang, the fact that Norman and Neil look to her as a go-to person for advice is a lovely nod to the notion that intelligence and heroism do not reside in a specific gender.

The film is filled with timely satiric highlights – as when the cop asks the townspeople, “What are you doing firing at civilians? That is for police to do!” The film mocks the hollowness of consumer-crazed Blithe Hollow, a town that trades in the “witch’s curse” and, in so doing, curses itself to consist of zombified consumers who are as ready to kill as they are to eat and shop. Hmmm, remind anyone of…Americans?
Alas, I don’t understand the complaint lodged by Boxoffice that this film is “in no way appropriate for kids.”  Tossing aside the strong anti-bullying and forgiveness-is-good messages of the film, the reviewer warns, “Nightmares and bedwetting are bad. But teaching your kids to take death casually is just bad parenting.” Guess I missed the film’s memo about taking death casually as I was too darn focused on the way prejudice, vengeance and normality are depicted as the true nightmares of Norm’s world – and our own.

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Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

2013 Oscar Week: Best Actress Nominee Rundown

Written by Rachel Redfern.
This year’s nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role has the most diverse age of any Best Actress nomination field. Ever. With Emmanuelle Riva leading at the graceful age of eighty-five and Quvenzhané Wallis blooming at the energetic age of nine, can we just say, ‘Yes!’
I enjoy the Academy Awards for what it is: big dresses, nice tuxedos, and a (slightly) staged attempt to decide the best films of the year; however, I often do feel like the films, directors, actors and actresses that are nominated, are not surprising choices. There’s a sense sometimes, that it’s the same five directors, actors and actresses that are nominated every year; Steven Spielberg for instance has been nominated for a Best Director award EIGHT TIMES and has won twice. Not that Spielberg isn’t a great director, but I feel like we’ve been here before.
Let’s be honest, the academy could use with a bit of shaking up and while an old and young actress being nominated at the same time is hardly going to cause a riot, it’s a step in the right direction.
So here it goes, a run down of this year’s Oscar nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Emmanuelle Riva nominated for Amour
 Emmanuelle Riva
It’s a well-known fact that the percentage of women over the age of forty in movies, is pretty low compared to the substantial portion of the population that they should actually represent. To whit, google ‘Women over forty in Hollywood’ and the majority of the articles that will pop up look something like this, “40 Foxiest Women Over 40,” or “Sexiest Women Over 40” and so on and so on. So basically, if you’re over forty in Hollywood and you can’t pass for thirty-two, then we just don’t want to hear about you.
That’s not to say, that there aren’t older actresses playing roles in movies, because there are, but just not important roles. The point in their lives that this age group has reached, is no longer interesting, despite the fact that Liam Neeson keeps running around beating up wolves and being mighty kick-ass for a man well past his fortieth year.
But, not this year. Emmanuelle Riva is the oldest Academy Awards nominee for Best Actress in the event’s 84-year history and she’s being nominated for Best Actress, meaning, one of the (if not the) main character in a film. Riva has been making movies for over fifty years, even starring next to Juliette Binoche in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s critically acclaimed film Three Colors: Blue. After having been such a stalwart actress and prolific artist, it’s wonderful that she’s finally been recognized for her contribution and skill.
Riva is being nominated for her role as Anne in the French film Amour, a beautiful film about love and aging and hope and even the scary thought of love in the face of death.
Naomi Watts nominated for The Impossible
 Naomi Watts
Let’s continue on with our theme of age. (I mean, why not? Chronology is as good a method as any to organize this post). Coming in at bright young age of forty-four, Watts has been producing movies for over twenty-five years and has starred in a fairly eclectic mess of films. She’s most famous for her role as Betty Elms in David Lynch’s thriller, Mulholland Drive, a film that garnered Watts a few awards back in 2001. However, this is Watt’s second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the first being for her work in 21 Grams; She’s also starred in big blockbusters such as, The Ring and King Kong.
Watt’s latest nomination for Best Actress is for playing Maria Bennet in The Impossible, a controversial film based on the true story of a family touring in Thailand when a tsunami hits and they’re separated. Go here to read Lady T’s take on the film.
Jessica Chastain nominated for Zero Dark Thirty
Jessica Chastian
Jessica Chastian is a fast-moving young actress who has exploded into the top tiers of Hollywood, probably most noticeably for her part in The Help and Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Two years ago I’d never even heard of her; today, Chastain has been nominated for one of the highest awards in film and is at the center of a divisive controversy involving her role in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of torture, and Chastain’s involvement in those scenes has a few people boycotting the actress and encouraging others to do the same.
However, Chastain’s experience of filming Zero Dark Thirty in Jordan speaks well about her commitment to her art since, as she says of her situation during that time, “with regard to the way women are treated,” she says, recalling a particular incident when soldiers insisted that she walk to the prison instead of being driven. “They don’t see women that often. I was like, ‘I’m not getting out of this car, how dare these guys’, but then you think: this woman had to live in Islamabad and all these places when she was doing this job – and had to experience the same treatment of women where she had no control.” 
Jennifer Lawrence nominated for Silver Linings Playbook
Jennifer Lawrence
The twenty-two year old queen of this year’s unbelievably popular, Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence is next on our list of Oscar nominees for Best Actress and startlingly, this is already her second nomination for the award. She was first up for the award in 2010 for her role in the amazing, Winter’s Bone, (Seriously, read about it, watch it, love it) and at the time was the second-youngest actress to ever be nominated.
After a ridiculously short non-award-winning break of one year, Lawrence has been nominated this year for starring alongside Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, another film about age and love and death and mental illness, though at the other end of the chronological spectrum from Amour. Lawrence has only been acting for six years and has managed to achieve some hefty success and play a wide-variety of roles: a poverty-stricken young girl from the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone, Mystique in X-Men First Class, Katniss in the Hunger Games and now, widow and sometimes sex addict, Tiffany Maxwell in Silver Linings Playbook. Whether she wins the Academy Award or not, I’m pretty sure that this will not be Lawrence’s last nomination. 
Quvezhane Wallis nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild
Quvenzhané Wallis
Quvenzhané Wallis. I wish I knew how to pronounce that name correctly because it just looks absolutely lovely. This pint-sized powder keg of delightful talent was a mere six years-old when she started shooting Beasts of the Southern Wild, and at the age of nine, she’s the youngest nominee for Best Actress that the competition has ever seen. Tatum O’Neal however, was a pretty close second since she was only ten when she won the award for Paper Moon in 1973 (an amazing movie starring Tatum’s father Ryan O’Neal and one of my favorite actresses ever, Madeleine Kahn). Interestingly enough, Wallis isn’t even the youngest nominee in academy history; Justin Henry was only eight when he was nominated for Best Actor in 1979 and Jackie Cooper was nine for his role in Skippy.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is Wallis first film, though the actress is already slated to appear in Steve McQueen’s new film Twelve Years A Slave later this year. Here’s hoping that she continues to act and thrive in Hollywood and that hopefully, she’ll be able to rush us into a new age of films filled with women of character and distinction.
Who do you think deserves win? Who do you think will win? (Two very different questions to my mind). Do you think that the oldest and youngest nominations for Best Actress falling in the same year is revolutionary? Or just a usual kind of year for the academy? 
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Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Hitchcock’ Turns the Master of Suspense into a Real Life Dud

Hitchcock
Guest post written by Candice Frederick, originally published at Reel Talk. Cross-posted with permission.
You’d think that any movie that involves the late great Alfred Hitchcock would be riveting, spectacular and painstakingly suspenseful to watch. But Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi’s debut feature film that follows the days leading up to the production of the filmmaker’s classic film, Psycho, is none of the above.
Right out the gate, Hitchcock struggles to simply be interesting. Although Anthony Hopkins looks comfortable inside the physical girth of Hitchcock and the actor captures both his enthusiasm for movies while also basking in the perks of being “the master of suspense,” John J. McLaughlin’s trite screenplay gives him little to work with. It makes his performance look like a great imitation, at best (reminiscent of Meryl Streep in 2009’s Julie & Julia). Instead of offering a candid and enlightening view of Hitchcock outside of his work, or even his deeper psychological thoughts behind Psycho, we get an artless chronicle of Hitchcock’s financial straits and lack of support from the studio. After McLaughlin’s brilliant screenplay for 2010’s Black Swan, this is a real letdown.
Another thing the film focuses on is the infamous shower scene in Psycho. Arguably one of the finest shot scenes in film history, Hitchcock spends so much time enticing the audience with it that when it happens, it’s just not special and just a quick moment. It really just plays up Hitchcock’s satisfaction with the audience’s reaction to the scene. Then it all fades to black. You just don’t do Hitchcock like that.
Helen Mirren as Alma Reville (aka Lady Hitchcock), Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock in Hitchcock
The one-dimensional character development doesn’t end with Hitchcock. Helen Mirren’s Lady Hitchcock (Alma Reville) is not much better realized. Mrs. Hitchcock’s story almost solely exists as an aside to her husband’s. Granted, the movie does show that she was more than just a wife; she was her husband’s right arm. She often helped rewrite his scripts, including Psycho, and appeared to be the glue that held her husband’s motivation for his career, even when he was deemed too old for Hollywood and the cards were stacked against him. Her talent was apparently overshadowed by her husband’s success. The arc is far too bland for an actress of Mirren’s caliber, but at least Mirren gets a few zingers to deliver to counter Hopkins’ “Try the finger sandwiches. They’re made of real fingers.”

Lines like that will undoubtedly give you a twinkle in your eye, since it’s easy to believe that Hitchcock the man might have had a fondness for perverse humor like that. But it just seems like lazy writing if you throw a couple of lines like that here and there when the rest of the film left much to be desired.

(L-R): Jessica Biehl as Vera Miles, Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock
With an impressive cast, including Toni Colette and Scarlett Johansson, and a rich subject, Hitchcock really should have been a better movie. Colette was completely underused as Hitchcock’s assistant, and Johansson’s portrayal of actress Janet Leigh provided nothing more than a few quips about her décolletage and screaming in the shower. Cloud Atlas‘ James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins is a dead ringer for the actor, even if he only had one tepidly compelling scene with Hopkins that digs into the character. Even Jessica Biel as actress Vera Miles is decent, even though her storyline had such potential but was glazed over and ultimately flatlined.
Gervasi at least manages to recapture the essence of Hollywood in the 50s and 60s with a recreation of the vintage studio lot and classy Tinseltown fashion. But stripping the character down to a point where his fictional depiction is far less fascinating than the actual persona seems counterproductive. If Hitchcock himself was alive today, he’d undoubtedly turn his nose up.
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Candice Frederick is a former NABJ award-winning journalist for Essence Magazine, and the writer for the film blog, Reel Talk. She is also the TV/Film critic for The Urban Daily. Follow her on Twitter. 

2013 Oscar Week: ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’: The Addition of Feminine Presence During a Quest for the Ages

Guest post written by Elise Schwartz.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey directed by Peter Jackson is the prequel story to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It begins by introducing the protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, on the day of his 111th birthday, the same day that the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings movie begins. It is the day that Baggins begins writing about the greatest adventure of his lifetime: an unexpected journey. The movie dialogues Baggins’ first encounter with Gandalf the Grey, a host of Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Goblins, while assisting the Dwarves in their quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain. 
This Hobbit movie, which will eventually be the first part in a trilogy, is based on roughly the first half of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The book was published in the late 1930s and was intended to be a stand-alone children’s book. The LOTR trilogy only came to be as a request from Tolkien’s publisher. It was during this trilogy that Tolkien really developed Middle Earth and the characters that lived within its regions. It’s possible that due to the fictional world not being truly developed prior to The Hobbit being published, we only meet the 15 male characters that make up the traveling party and their enemies. Jackson took it upon himself to bring the two stories together as a whole movie series by introducing additional characters to the audience of The Hobbit that play a large roles in the LOTR. One main example of this is through the character Galadriel, the Elf Queen. 
Galadriel appears in a scene that was created specifically for the movie adaptation. During this scene there is a meeting of the White Council, which consists of Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, Elrond the Lord of Rivendell and Galadriel. The council meets to discuss the mission of the traveling party to take back the Lonely Mountain and the role of Baggins as part of the company. Galadriel remains quiet and watchful during much of the meeting’s discussions. Though, she does interject during a heated debate between Gandalf and Saruman, and insists that Saruman let Gandalf speak. At the conclusion of the meeting, she offers Gandalf guidance and assistance if he were to ever need her help. 
The members of the council treat Galadriel in an ethereal, yet mindful way. They show her respect in a manner that almost makes it seem like she should be placed on a pedestal. It is much how she and other female characters are regarded in the LOTR. Jackson was careful to show this in the style that it was intended – with dignity and admiration towards women of power. 
Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Many other reviews such as this one have questioned why Galadriel was included in the film, when her character wasn’t introduced in the book. Was this just a way of adding females into the plot line? It’s possible. But we must remember that Jackson is tying the two series together and trying to create cohesion, which will turn into a much grander story overall. So why didn’t he include Arwen or Eowyn? Simply from a historical timeline, this is 60 years prior to the LOTR stories and Galadriel was the only female character Tolkien introduced that was alive at the time. As well, she is a character of authority that can add substance to the overall journey of the series. 
So, even though The Hobbit was not meant to hold a well-rounded cast, Jackson’s film adaptation of the first half of the book does an exceptional job of introducing the audience to the world of Middle Earth and the characters within. He was careful to insert only the most necessary characters that needed introduction while sticking to the main themes and plot directions of the book. Though, I’m still curious to know if he will end up pushing the envelope enough with the Hobbit series to take home another Best Picture award in the future.
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Elise Schwartz writes at HalloweenCostumes.com and has been known to spend an entire weekend watching the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings films start to finish.  

2013 Oscar Week: Heroic Black Love and Male Privilege in ‘Django Unchained’

Guest post written by Joshunda Sanders.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained was a movie I never thought I’d see or write about. As much as I adore movies and popular culture, particularly when black characters are front and center, well, the Crunk Feminist Collective put it best: 
“… I am not a fan of Tarantino at all. At all. Generally, I find his work contrived, overly self-conscious, and, frankly, boring. Plus, to me he’s like the worst kind of hipster racist, a grown up version of Justin Timberlake desperately trying to affirm his black card at all times, while thoroughly proving himself to be white as hell…”
I’ll add the caveat that I like Tarantino’s gumption, but that’s where the warm feelings end. Tarantino is the Kanye West of moviemakers: obnoxious as he is talented, arrogant and flippant as he is hard to ignore. America loves men like him. For that reason, he brings up all my contrarian cockles. Between the grotesque violence and excessive use of the N-word in his movies, combined with the fact that I did not appreciate Pulp Fiction or From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, (the only movie I stomped out of mid-way) I saw no reason to spend money to see another Tarantino production.
What led me to the theater, finally, was what always leads me there: deep curiosity and a good friend. 
Salamishah Tillet, writing for CNN’s In America blog, wrote: “There is much to criticize in this film: the excessive use of the N-word, gratuitous gun violence and its male dominance. Women are objects of apathy or sympathy and are not as nearly as complex or charismatic as any of the male characters. This is very much a movie about how men, white and black, navigate America’s racial maze.”
Dr. King Shultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx) in Django Unchained

I enjoyed Jamie Foxx at the center of this inverted spaghetti Western. German King Shultz, a hilarious German bounty hunter riding in a carriage with a giant bouncy tooth swaying from its roof, plucks Django from a group of weary slaves and transforms him into a superhero. Viewers are shown flashbacks of Django with Broomhilda, (Kerry Washington) his slave wife who was taken from him. So we get the moments of tenderness without oversexed images. But as Tillet mentions, Washington, like other women, are one-dimensional with no agency. 

I feel that I should make the case for a better use of Washington in Django, but it makes sense to me that Tarantino wouldn’t provide any context for black women with agency — he did it with limited success in Jackie Brown as homage to Blaxploitation because the agency of Pam Grier was a seductive plot point. I also would have had to support Tarantino movies for the rest of my life if he had gotten it right. Instead, I felt a sense of relief that a black woman was depicted a damsel in distress, exoticized (she speaks German) but not hypersexualized. 
Hildi is worth fighting for and she maintains her dignity. It’s a story I’ve not witnessed before in a Western on the big screen, and rarely anywhere else. 
Obstensibly, Django is allowed to exact his revenge on white slave-owners and black men who would keep him from being great. Foxx is the best at this kind of cool glee. He has come a long way from playing the buffoonish Wanda on In Living Color. That his bloodlust is inspired by love and winning back a black woman as a prize allowed this black woman viewer to construct an alternative narrative for his motivations and for the justification of mass murder. 
I have also never had the privilege or pleasure of laughing deeply or sincerely during any film set against the backdrop of slavery in the antebellum South. It is humor and wit that carries Tarantino in Django, the unexpected surprise. 
In a scene that evokes the KKK with white racist men wearing bags over their heads, there’s a bit where they start arguing about the fact that they can’t see, that one of their wives put a lot of time and effort into the thing and can’t y’all just get over this whole can’t seeing thing? I’ve got a goofy, dark sense of humor, so maybe it was just me, but I could not stop laughing loudly during that scene, in part because it humanizes virulent racists while also mocking their stupidity and vanity in a surprising way.
It also makes you forget what they are, though his accurate portrayal of the harrowing, sickening depth of racist terror reminds the viewer. That felt dangerous and provocative to me. The type of emotions we go to the movies for. Ditto for the score, which blends Blaxploitation with hip hop fantastically, updating the Western with a big of swag.

Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) and Broomhilda von Schaft (Kerry Washington) in Django Unchained

Because slavery and violence are rarely spoken about as a kind of spiritual terrorism to say nothing of emotional and psychological antagonism against blacks, I was pleasantly surprised by that accuracy here, explained by Jelani Cobb as violence “deployed as a kind of spiritual redemption” at The New Yorker:
“And if this dynamic is applicable anywhere in American history, it’s on a slave plantation. Frederick Douglass, in his slave narrative, traced his freedom not to the moment when he escaped to the north but the moment in which he first struck an overseer who attempted to whip him. Quentin Tarantino is the only filmmaker who could pack theatres with multiracial audiences eager to see a black hero murder a dizzying array of white slaveholders and overseers. (And, in all fairness, it’s not likely that a black director would’ve gotten a budget to even attempt such a thing.)”
Like Cobb, and, more famously, Spike Lee, some of my hesitance to support Django had to do with the unfair privilege afforded Tarantino to take creative liberties with not just using racist language with such entitlement (which is how it comes across even if it’s not his intention) but also with the power and assumption of greatness that would never happen for a black director. I find the idea that Tarantino should not be allowed to be great because he calls black folks out of our names to be a symptom of our greater anxieties. The issue to me is not whether or not Tarantino is racist, but that he benefits from the privileges afforded him as a white male to pick and choose his racist tendencies.
There are tons of creative men — white, black, brown — who have this privilege. If they make mediocre films or books, do we stop to analyze why? Well, sometimes. With Tarantino, all the time. In the case of this film, that criticism was a relentless din. I don’t have an answer for why I find that odd and complicated, except that creativity, racism and privilege are embedded in American culture. All creative products are considered superior if they are made by white people. That Tarantino benefits from this is neither his fault, nor is it new. I’m not apologizing for him, I’m simply pointing out why I think the discussion of the flaws in his movie as historical sticking points and the use of the word Nigger miss the point.

Django (Jamie Foxx) and Broomhilda von Schaft (Kerry Washington) in Django Unchained
But I’m also a sucker for a love story, so because Django is about heroic love, about the kind of victory that necessitates revenge, it thrilled me unexpectedly.
Not just any heroic romantic love, which we never see, really, between black men and women anymore, but also about the love of freedom, the universal thirst for power. At the end of the day, I cared much more that Tarantino was true to that than I do about the Spaghetti Western genre or whether or not the details of slavery were historically accurate. I know enough about history that I would not ever expect Tarantino to offer me an accurate lesson on the institution of slavery.
So, the film is not perfect but as critics agree, it is clever. It is also as close to perfect as we can hope for until someone writes the perfect heroic black love story and revenge fantasy.
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Joshunda Sanders is a writer and journalist based in Austin. She blogs at jvictoriasanders.com.

2013 Oscar Week: Maya from ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is an Emotional Character

Guest post written by Alison Vingiano, originally published at AGV Notes. Cross-posted with permission.
The movie theater was already packed when I found my seat on Sunday afternoon. When the lights dimmed, the screen stayed dark. Phone calls from September 11, 2001 echoed throughout the room. I don’t think anybody breathed for the first three minutes of the film.
Zero Dark Thirty was one of the best movies I saw this year. The protagonist, Maya, captivated me with her focus and passion. She was a realistic, interesting character to watch, despite how little we learn about her life. At times she was overwhelmed, but she never collapsed with emotion or passion. Maya was no Carrie Mathison. On Monday, still thinking about the film, I read that day’s TIME Magazine piece. The author interviewed Kathryn Bigelow about the deeply perplexing final shot. She wrote:
“You may be wondering why Maya — so stoic and static throughout her years of hunting — breaks down into sobs when the mission is over… All this comes after a decade of ruthless pursuit, in a career to which she has sacrificed her entire life and, for the audience, more than two hours of watching a character display no hint of an emotion other than vengefulness, dedication, patriotism or anger.”
Okay there, TIME Magazine, check yo’self. No emotion other than anger? Stoic and static throughout her years of hunting? Yes, Maya does not cry until the final shot. Deeming her emotionless, however, narrows the complexity of her character. It assumes that a women who does not cry does not feel. It is important to recognize Maya as an emotional character because doing so illustrates the depth of her strength. It shows that emotional women are competent, focused and determined as well.
Maya displays a wide emotional range. In fact, had her character been a man, reviews would likely comment about his brave sentimentality. We would discuss he queazy response to torture, for example, or his frightened reaction to being attacked by gunfire. She is too emotive for a man, yet not emotive enough for a woman.
Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty
Let’s look at specific examples of Maya’s emotional reactions. When Maya’s colleague is killed, we see her curled up in her office, paralyzed by (what I interpreted as) sadness and shock. Many scenes later, we see that a picture of Maya with this friend is her computer background. When Maya first experiences the interrogation of detainees, she looks away.  The sight upsets her. In fact, when she is left alone with a detainee and he asks for her help, the audience cannot predict if she will succumb to his request. Finally, she delivers a strong but difficult answer: “You can help yourself by telling the truth.” Later, when Maya is shot at by a group of young men, we see a panicked, unrestrained reaction. When Maya receives the call that US troops are raiding the mansion in Abbottabad, she hangs up the phone with such a fierce expression of fear and excitement that I wanted to hug her.
Maya is a stronger character because of these natural emotional responses; she lets herself feel and fully experience the trauma she endures. She responds like a human being and a CIA veteran, not as some stoic, cold-hearted robot. When Maya cried in the final shot, it was a logical progression of her character’s growth. She just achieved her greatest career goal, while also changing the course of the war on terror. How could she not be overwrought with emotional display? I was not at all shocked, as the TIME article suggests viewers must have been.
We should not assume all female characters will emote similarly. Real women display their feelings in various ways, some of which include “not crying.” It is wrong to see a woman thriving in a high-stress job  – without tears – and think “wow, she is emotionless!” I doubt we would assume that about a powerful career oriented man. We would simply discuss how well he performed his job.
Strength largely derives from how one processes their feelings. Cinematic portraits of powerful women are not just the Catwoman or GI Jane. We also need to see and accept powerful, emotional women in film. Yes, Maya was angry, determined and combative for much of the movie. But she also showed fear, sadness and defeat. The beauty of Maya is that she was written with the same complexity as any male character. And you know why? Because she’s based on a real-life, three-dimensional woman. Calling her emotionless insults the depth of her intricately formed character.
———-
Alison Vingiano is a writer, comedian, filmmaker and feminist residing in New York City. Her work has been featured on many websites, including Thought Catalog, Feministing, After Ellen and The Jane Dough. Follow her at www.agvnotes.tumblr.com and on Twitter at @agvnotes.

2013 Oscar Week: Cosmology, Gender, and Quvenzhané Wallis: ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

Written by Max Thornton.
In my studies, I work with the intersection of pop culture and religion. This is a frustrating field: a lot of the discourse from the theological side is exceedingly shallow, and the explicit pop-culture engagements with religion are rarely any better.
Honestly, I often find I can have the richest theological dialogue with popular culture that is not explicitly religious, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a superb example.
It is, of course, religious in the broad twentieth-century existential sense of “ultimate concern” and “meaning-making.” The film tackles Big Themes of loss, belonging, growing up, but it does so through a very specific story – that of six-year-old Hushpuppy, living with her difficult father in an imperiled swampland community called the Bathtub.
Quvenzhané Wallis is astonishing as Hushpuppy. I own T-shirts older than this girl, but she knocked my socks off and I hope she wins a billion Oscars. Like the film itself, she had to pull off a delicate balancing of the cosmic and the intimate. As the cinematography veers between wide sweeps of polar ice caps and close, intense shots of life in the Bathtub, so Wallis seemingly effortlessly manages both the very embodied work of near-wordless acting and the lyrical voiceovers that punctuate the film. With lines like “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted,” Beasts of the Southern Wild reminds me a little of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, but whereas that film bored me rigid, Beasts moved me to tears.
Or, to express that in Internet…

Part of that dynamic is simply that both films exist in an entertainment culture overwhelmingly dominated by white middle-class people. Before The Tree of Life ever came out, I had reached a point where if I never again in my life saw another piece of entertainment about a white suburban family, it would be too soon. A film about a poor, largely African-American community in a Louisiana bayou automatically grabs my attention to a much greater degree (and, let’s be perfectly honest, the fact that it’s 45 minutes shorter than Malick’s endless bloody movie doesn’t hurt).

Interestingly, the film was initially a play about a father and son. Writer Lucy Alibar’s initial choice to distance herself from the young character through the gender-flip is reversed for the screen, and she is not unaware of the politics of gender:

“We made a hero story with a little girl in it, and she is fighting for her family, not her boyfriend. I never saw that growing up, I thought I had to be a little boy to be a hero.” (BlackBook interview)

“I always felt like there wasn’t a blueprint for father daughter relationships — for them or for us. Because what are they supposed to do with us, treat us like boys, or small women, or what? Father daughter relationships are so unique from family to family, and I’d love to watch it explored more onstage.” (Barnes & Noble interview)

Suddenly it makes sense that Hushpuppy’s father encourages her to be “a man”: it’s the only way of relating that he knows. He simply has no other way of expressing his feelings or his hopes for his young daughter.

Hushpuppy, being a man.

The film beautifully navigates the relationship between independence and interdependence. From the very beginning, where Hushpuppy and her father live in separate but adjacent tiny houses, the six-year-old is never babied or coddled in any way; and yet she consistently stresses her understanding of the world and her place in it. She has a remarkably holistic idea of the cosmos, completely lacking in anthropocentrism – her description of a hospital: “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall” – and astounding in its sense of perspective.

Although the film itself doesn’t directly address the concept of God, it is pervaded with a religious sense. Lucy Alibar again:

“God isn’t this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He’s your buddy, and you can talk about everything. And writing this play and working on the film, seeing it, I felt God’s presence. I just had more of a sense of my place in the whole scope of everything.” (Elle interview)

Alibar’s triumph is that the film perfectly walks the line of contradictory impulses, affirming the individual’s “place in the whole scope of everything” without being deterministic, stressing the need to (as Hushpuppy’s teacher puts it) “take care of those smaller and sweeter than you” without being paternalistic, portraying an aching realism through a fantastical story of long-dead beasts. Cinema’s triumph is the emergence of an amazing young talent in QuvenzhanéWallis.

“I see that I’m a little piece in a big, big universe. And that makes things right.”



Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Les Misérables’: Some Musicals Are More Feminist Than Others

Guest post written by Natalie Wilson, originally published at Ms. Magazine. Cross-posted with permission.
While Les Misérables is not your typical musical–or, as this Guardian review puts it, “There’s no dancing, there are no jazz hands and there is next to no speech”–it is typical of the genre in that, like opera, it includes more female characters than do many plays, movies and novels. Regardless if this is due to the fondness for female voices or to the swoon-inducing love ballads adored by so many, this viewer is thankful for the diverse female characters so wonderfully played by Anne Hathaway(Fantine), Amanda Seyfriend (Cosette), Samantha Barks (Éponine) and Helena Bonham Carter (Madame Thénardier).
The film adaptation, based on the musical (seen by over 60 million people), which is itself based on Victor Hugo’s novel, arguably heightens the proto-feminist elements of the original narrative as it allows for a more close-up, more harrowing depiction of the key female characters, all of whom are “miserable” for justifiable reasons.
Though the film has been referred to as a “lobotomized opera,” it can more aptly be described as an operatic musical that not only focuses on macro problems of human existence–morality, freedom, power, forgiveness–but also on how these problems play out at the micro level, particularly how the macro power of men effects women on a micro level. As noted at Democratic Underground, Victor Hugo gets:
“…the plight of women in his society, especially the grisettes (working class young women) and prostitutes, and how they were helpless against not just men of power, but men in general, and how nice poor girls could so easily be discarded and have [their lives] ruined because of becoming pregnant or rebuffing sexual advances.”

Fantine is the key character to have her life ruined in such a manner. Abandoned by the man who impregnates her, she is working in the 19th century version of a sweatshop when we first meet her in the film. She ultimately turns to sexual slavery so as to continue sending money to the unscrupulous caretakers (the Thénardiers) who, unbeknowst to her, are abusing and exploiting her young daughter, Cosette.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables
Fantine is portrayed sympathetically in the text and musical, but the film adaptation emphasizes the horrors of forced prostitution, something the musical renditions of the song “Lovely Ladies” frequently belie. Often performed in an upbeat, jokey manner, in the film the song instead becomes a battle cry against sexual slavery, with the costuming, make-up, sets and lighting bringing the horrors behind the lyrics to life as the sickly, starving, cold, tattered and abused women sing:
Lovely ladies
Ready for the call
Standing up or lying down
Or any way at all
Bargain prices up against the wall

After her hair has been cut, her teeth removed and sold, Fantine joins the song, singing,
Come on, Captain
You can wear your shoes
Don’t it make a change
To have a girl who can’t refuse
Easy money
Lying on a bed
Just as well they never see
The hate that’s in your head
Don’t they know they’re making love
To one already dead!

Widely lauded in the role (as here, here, and here), her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” further encapsulates the pathos and desperation of her character–something which is sometimes lost in more “Broadway” renditions of the song (a la Susan Boyle).
Of playing Fantine, Anne Hathaway notes,
“What I did was I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. … I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, for this particular story, I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now. She’s probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world, and so every day that I was her, I just thought—this isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world and I hope that in all our lifetimes — like, today — we see it end.”

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Regardless of what can be said about Hathaway’s weight loss for the role (critiqued here), her framing of Fantine as a sexual slave, NOT a prostitute, is key, as it refuses to glorify or joke about what is so often swept under the rug regarding sex work: that the majority of women do not “choose” it but are forced into it–a realization emphasized by Hugo but often lost in musical renditions. Hugo writes of Fantine,

“What is the history of Fantine? It is society buying a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a bit of bread. Misery makes the offer, society accepts … it is said that slavery has disappeared from the European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists: but it weighs now only upon woman, and it is called prostitution.”

The film, like Hugo’s novel, blames society for sexual slavery, rather than individual men or women. Each also portrays her “choice” as that between life and death for her and her daughter.
Hugo’s progressive view of sexual politics, as well as his critical attitude towards “polite society” (discussed here) imbue his work in other Les Mis plotlines as well–as with his depiction of the vengeful Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) and the valiant prisononer 24601, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), imprisoned 19 years for the crime of stealing bread. Though these two males are at the center of the story, the females are just as (if not more) memorable (and certainly outperform and out-sing Crowe in his bombastic version of Javert).

Amanda Seyfried as Cosette in Les Miserables
Cosette, both as the child abused by the Thénardiers and then as the adult who falls for the revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne), is also a micro picture of a macro problem — the abuse of female children, especially those in foster care and/or poverty, and the fact that one of the few “escapes” offered to such women is love and romance. The same “escape” is the only one that similarly maltreated Eponine is forced into. As noted here, she is “Raised by sociopathic parents and then forced into a life of poverty and crime” and “only wants the man she loves to love her, and sacrifices all to prove her love.”

Samanta Barks as Eponine in Les Miserables

The Funny Feminist takes issue with this plotline in particular, noting that Eponine has sadly become “the international spokeswoman for girls crushing on their male best friends, who swoon over the richer, more popular girl.” Like a 19th century Bella Swan, Eponine is hopelessly devoted to her Edward, in the form of Marius, but he only has eyes for Cosette. If the musical falters in its quasi-feminist politics anywhere, it is here, with the strong , resilient Eponine belting out her song of unrequited love, “On My Own,” while the male revolutionaries prepare to fight for a more egalitarian France–or, as the Funny Feminist puts it “when the poor folk rally against the 1 percent and the Mitt Romneys,” Eponine is busy singing a  “pity me, my life is so sad” song. To be fair, while she is indeed lovestruck, she also disguises herself as a boy in order to join in the revolution, and ultimately gives her life to save Marius.
While some reviews slam the film for not being political enough, as here (where the film is described as “a picturesque 19th-century version of Occupy Wall Street” lacking political context), I would counter that the film drips with politics, especially the micro politics captured in the feminist mantra “the personal is political.” From the tragic Fantine to the orphaned Cosette to the maltreated Eponine, the film depicts a story that is still all too true, and does so better than any musical version I’ve seen, showing that women–revolution or no–are all too often beaten, abused, exploited, raped and murdered. While it’s long ranked as one of my favorite musicals, it now holds the number one spot in this feminist heart for best musical film ever.
———-
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

The Feministing Five: Melissa Silverstein and Kathryn Kolbert, Athena Film Festival Co-Founders by Anna Sterling via Feministing

Fun with Stats: Winners of Oscars for Acting by Age

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Michael Caine, Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank, and Kevin Spacey at the Academy Awards in 2000
I’ve seen a lot of Oscar talk asserting that the acting categories for women skew younger than the acting categories for men, which certainly seems true (and would logically follow from the relative scarcity of good roles for older women in Hollywood). But you know me, I’m not satisfied until I’ve seen the cold hard stats.
So I ran the numbers. I only used the winners instead of the entire field of nominees this time around, mostly because calculating the ages various people were on various dates in history is a real chore and someone already did all that pesky arithmetic when it comes to the winners.  
Scatter plot of ages of Oscar winners in acting categories

I apologize for the hokey pink and blue color scheme, but it’s the easiest way to illustrate that the cluster of women winners in the acting categories falls a bit below that of the men.  This plot also makes it clear that there have been no major trends over the years; the winners aren’t generally getting any older or younger in any category. 

The average age of the Best Actress winners is 36.2 with a standard deviation of 11.67; and the average age of Best Actor winners is 43.9 with a standard deviation of 8.86. Best Supporting Actress’ ages average at 39.9 with a standard deviation of 13.86; Best Supporting Actors’ ages average at 49.6 with a standard deviation of 14.44.  Here’s how these distributions overlap:
Histogram depicting ages of winners in acting categories
In the supporting categories, we see a wider distribution of the ages of the winners, not only because children and the elderly are more often in supporting roles, but because child actors are often placed in the supporting category even when they play lead roles (e.g. Timothy Hutton, Tatum O’Neal, Patty Duke). [This year, of course, breaks from that pattern, with both the oldest-ever and youngest-ever nominees in the Best Actress category (Emmanuelle Riva, age 85, and Quevnzhané Wallis, age 9).]

I ran an ANOVA (analysis of variance) test and Tukey’s multiple comparison post-test and found that nearly all the groups’ distributions vary to the point of statistical significance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no statistical significance between the distribution of ages in the lead and supporting acting categories for women (but the difference between ages of lead actors and supporting actors is significant). Interestingly, there’s also no statistical significance between Best Supporting Actress winners’ ages and Best Actor winner’s ages.

So I also lumped the best lead and best supporting categories together by sex and ran a t-test to get more a more simple answer. This test yielded a p<.0001, indicating extreme statistical significance. 
   
Now that we know this data is statistically significant, let’s try to visualize it more clearly:

First I broke the groups down demographically:

Age demographics of Oscar Winners in Acting Categories
As you can see here, more than half of Best Actress winners (62.35%) are age 35 or younger, whereas only 14.12% of Best Actor winners are that young. Male actors younger than 35 are also rarely awarded in the supporting category (14.48%), but women under 35 still make up nearly half the winners of Best Supporting Actress (47.37%).  

I also broke down the winners’ ages by decade:

Age by decade of Oscar winners in acting categories
This chart further illustrates what we already know: the supporting categories are open to a wider range of actors of either sex, but the female categories are dominated by younger performers, whereas the male categories skew older. Like with my analysis of Best Picture nominations versus lead acting nominations, I don’t think this is as much of a problem with the Academy as it is with Hollywood itself. If there were more strong roles for older women (and perhaps more strong roles for younger men?) the age distribution of Academy Award winners for acting would be more aligned between the sexes.

Perhaps the most striking figure I found is that there has been only one winner of Best Actor under the age of 30 (Adrien Brody, who won at age 29 for The Pianist in 2003) but twenty-nine Best Actress winners in their 20s. 
Adrien Brody, the only person to win Best Actor under the age of 30
As a final note, I’ve been asked, as an Oscar-obsessed feminist, if there is any reason why the acting categories should be split by sex. I’ve never had a good answer, mostly because it opens up a whole kettle of cats about the rejecting the gender binary and biological essentialism while celebrating gender differences that I generally don’t have the time or interest to drag into my awards talk. But reviewing all this data and seeing the reflection of various types of sex discrimination within it, I think the Academy isn’t ready for a gender-neutral “Best Performance” award. 

2013 Academy Awards Diversity Checklist

Written by Lady T

I want to talk a little about the Oscar nominees this year. (“But, Lady T, you talk too much about the Oscars.” “Oh yeah? Your MOM talks too much about the Oscars!”)

Seriously, she can’t shut up about him.

 
Mostly, I want to talk about the Oscars in terms of diversity. We all know that the Academy Awards are usually all about white dudes recognizing other white dudes (and women, in the acting categories). How did the Academy fare this year in terms of recognizing women in non-acting roles, and people of color in general? Let’s take a look.

Number of Men Nominated for Best Director: 5/5

Commentary: Kathryn Bigelow was infamously snubbed for a directing nomination for her work on Zero Dark Thirty. Was this a deliberate act of sexism on the part of the Academy? I would say yes, except for the fact that Ben Affleck was also overlooked for his work on Argo, and they were both considered frontrunners in this category. (Bigelow won almost all the precursor awards prior to the announcement of the Oscar nominations, and Affleck has won all the precursor awards after the announcement.) I think Bigelow and Affleck were overlooked simply because everyone underestimated the appeal of Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild, the two little movies that could. The backlash against Bigelow in the press, however, certainly reeks of sexism.

Whatevs, she already has two.

Number of People of Color Nominated for Best Director: 1/5

Commentary: Ang Lee is nominated for his work on Life of Pi. This is good news, because Ang Lee is an excellent director and deserves every nomination that comes his way.

The “A” in “Ang” stands for “Awesome.”

Number of Best Picture-Nominated Films With a Person of Color as a Protagonist: 4/9

Number of Best Picture-Nominated Films With a Person of Color as a Protagonist, Played by a POC Actor: 3/9

Commentary: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, and Life of Pi have all been nominated for Best Picture, and their films all have POC actors/protagonists (Quvenzhane Wallis, Jamie Foxx, and Suraj Sharma, respectively). Argo technically has a POC protagonist, but the role played by a white actor (Ben Affleck). I don’t know whether Affleck cast himself out of vanity, an understandable desire to perform and direct at the same time, fear that the racist film industry wouldn’t stand behind and promote a film without a famous white actor in the lead role, or all of the above.  

Jamie Foxx as Django in my favorite movie of the year

Number of Best Picture Winners With a Person of Color as a Protagonist, Played By a POC Actor: 5.5/84

Commentary: In the history of the Academy Awards, 5.5 films with POC as protagonists have won the Best Picture award – In The Heat of the Night, Gandhi, Driving Miss Daisy, The Last Emperor, Slumdog Millionaire, and Crash. (I said 5.5 because Crash is an ensemble film without a clear protagonist, and also because it’s not well-written and barely counts a movie.) It’s also worth noting that two of those films – In the Heat of the Night and Driving Miss Daisy – have white co-protagonists who share an equal load with their POC co-leads.

So, this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees have almost as many POC leads as all Best Picture WINNERS in history. Does that make this year awesome or previous years really, really white? Make of that what you will.

The unbelievably cute kids in Slumdog Millionaire

  
Number of Best Actor Nominees From Best Picture Nominees: 3/5

Number of Best Actress Nominees From Best Picture Nominees: 4/5

Commentary: Last year, exactly one Best Picture nominee out of nine (The Help) had a female protagonist, and only one Best Actress nominee was from a Best Picture nominee. (Three of the Best Actor nominees were from Best Picture nominees.) This year, the number of Best Actress nominees from Best Picture nominees actually outnumber the number of Best Actor nominees from Best Picture nominees.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that two of these Best Actress nominees – Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook and Emmanuelle Riva in Amour – are co-protagonists to their male leads, played by Bradley Cooper and Jean-Louis Trintignant. But Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty are unquestionably the leads in their films.

Quvenzhane Wallis in my other favorite movie of the year

Is the Academy finally starting to recognize that movies starring women, about women, are worthwhile films, films that tell universal stories about the human condition, films that are not just “women’s films?” Let’s hope so.

Did you notice anything about the diversity, and lack thereof, in the Academy Award nominations? Have at it at the comments!
  
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com. 

2013 Academy Awards Diversity Checklist

Written by Lady T

I want to talk a little about the Oscar nominees this year. (“But, Lady T, you talk too much about the Oscars.” “Oh yeah? Your MOM talks too much about the Oscars!”)

Seriously, she can’t shut up about him.

 
Mostly, I want to talk about the Oscars in terms of diversity. We all know that the Academy Awards are usually all about white dudes recognizing other white dudes (and women, in the acting categories). How did the Academy fare this year in terms of recognizing women in non-acting roles, and people of color in general? Let’s take a look.

Number of Men Nominated for Best Director: 5/5

Commentary: Kathryn Bigelow was infamously snubbed for a directing nomination for her work on Zero Dark Thirty. Was this a deliberate act of sexism on the part of the Academy? I would say yes, except for the fact that Ben Affleck was also overlooked for his work on Argo, and they were both considered frontrunners in this category. (Bigelow won almost all the precursor awards prior to the announcement of the Oscar nominations, and Affleck has won all the precursor awards after the announcement.) I think Bigelow and Affleck were overlooked simply because everyone underestimated the appeal of Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild, the two little movies that could. The backlash against Bigelow in the press, however, certainly reeks of sexism.

Whatevs, she already has two.

Number of People of Color Nominated for Best Director: 1/5

Commentary: Ang Lee is nominated for his work on Life of Pi. This is good news, because Ang Lee is an excellent director and deserves every nomination that comes his way.

The “A” in “Ang” stands for “Awesome.”

Number of Best Picture-Nominated Films With a Person of Color as a Protagonist: 4/9

Number of Best Picture-Nominated Films With a Person of Color as a Protagonist, Played by a POC Actor: 3/9

Commentary: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, and Life of Pi have all been nominated for Best Picture, and their films all have POC actors/protagonists (Quvenzhane Wallis, Jamie Foxx, and Suraj Sharma, respectively). Argo technically has a POC protagonist, but the role played by a white actor (Ben Affleck). I don’t know whether Affleck cast himself out of vanity, an understandable desire to perform and direct at the same time, fear that the racist film industry wouldn’t stand behind and promote a film without a famous white actor in the lead role, or all of the above.  

Jamie Foxx as Django in my favorite movie of the year

Number of Best Picture Winners With a Person of Color as a Protagonist, Played By a POC Actor: 5.5/84

Commentary: In the history of the Academy Awards, 5.5 films with POC as protagonists have won the Best Picture award – In The Heat of the Night, Gandhi, Driving Miss Daisy, The Last Emperor, Slumdog Millionaire, and Crash. (I said 5.5 because Crash is an ensemble film without a clear protagonist, and also because it’s not well-written and barely counts a movie.) It’s also worth noting that two of those films – In the Heat of the Night and Driving Miss Daisy – have white co-protagonists who share an equal load with their POC co-leads.

So, this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees have almost as many POC leads as all Best Picture WINNERS in history. Does that make this year awesome or previous years really, really white? Make of that what you will.

The unbelievably cute kids in Slumdog Millionaire

  
Number of Best Actor Nominees From Best Picture Nominees: 3/5

Number of Best Actress Nominees From Best Picture Nominees: 4/5

Commentary: Last year, exactly one Best Picture nominee out of nine (The Help) had a female protagonist, and only one Best Actress nominee was from a Best Picture nominee. (Three of the Best Actor nominees were from Best Picture nominees.) This year, the number of Best Actress nominees from Best Picture nominees actually outnumber the number of Best Actor nominees from Best Picture nominees.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that two of these Best Actress nominees – Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook and Emmanuelle Riva in Amour – are co-protagonists to their male leads, played by Bradley Cooper and Jean-Louis Trintignant. But Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild and Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty are unquestionably the leads in their films.

Quvenzhane Wallis in my other favorite movie of the year

Is the Academy finally starting to recognize that movies starring women, about women, are worthwhile films, films that tell universal stories about the human condition, films that are not just “women’s films?” Let’s hope so.

Did you notice anything about the diversity, and lack thereof, in the Academy Award nominations? Have at it at the comments!
  
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.