Robin Hitchcock – Page 8

RIP Roger Ebert

Film critic Roger Ebert, 1942–2013

Roger Ebert died at age 70 yesterday, only days after announcing he would be taking a “leave of presence” from his career because his cancer had returned. Hearing the sad news of his passing, those words stand out in my mind: “leave of presence.” Even though Ebert has gone to that great movie theater in the sky, his presence will always be felt by movie lovers, cultural commentators, and writers of all stripes. As someone who not only loves movies and writing but writes about movies, I am feeling the loss of Roger Ebert to my very core.

Watching Siskel & Ebert At the Movies was a Sunday morning ritual in my house growing up. Other people went to church; my family watched a syndicated film review program. And I was indoctrinated as a movie lover. I remember that even as a child I was struck by Ebert’s joyful love of film. His job title may have been “film critic,” but he often seemed to be more of a “film appreciator.” Unlike pop culture’s caricature of critics, from Waldorf and Statler in the Muppets to Jay Sherman on The Critic, Ebert wasn’t looking for things to complain about. He wanted to like movies. One of Ebert’s core principles of movie reviewing was to evaluate a movie in its own standing: he wouldn’t detract a kids’ movie for being childish or a broad comedy for failing to take on serious social issues. This guy gave four stars to The Karate Kid. He knew a great movie when he saw one.

Nevertheless, Ebert may be better remembered for his negative reviews, because his biting wit was well-employed in take downs of the worst that the cinema had to offer. Ebert published two books compiling his harshest reviews, I Hated Hated Hated This Movie in 2000 and Your Movie Sucks in 2007. On his television program, many of Ebert’s “thumbs down” takes on film had the air of “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” It took a lot to get Ebert to really let loose the vitriol, but when he did, it was priceless. (Ebert also published several volumes on The Great Movies, well worth your time!)

While Ebert was able to fully enjoy and celebrate mainstream entertainment, he was still a great advocate for smaller and independent films. He’s hosted a film festival colloquially called EbertFest for the past 15 years, meant to champion “overlooked” films, in later years placing them alongside revisited classics. We here at Bitch Flicks know all to well that women-centric films can be overlooked by Hollywood, and EbertFest gave a select few of them, including Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground and Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, a second day in the spotlight. I also clearly remember Ebert selecting Eve’s Bayou as the best film of 1997, which is what brought me to watch it, and it is one of my favorite films of all time.

As a champion of both low-brow but satisfying flicks and brilliant works outside of the mainstream, Roger Ebert’s pure love of movies brought an inclusiveness to his work that is exceptionally appealing to this feminist critic. He would never dismiss a rom-com for being a “chick flick,” and he was an advocate for the smaller women-centric films that so often go overlooked. Ebert’s incredible perspective on the cinematic landscape, his infectious love for movies, and his inimitable writing skills have shaped the last forty years of media criticism. His influence will live on, his memory will inspire and guide us, and film reviews and films themselves will be all the better for it. Thumbs up, Mr. Ebert.

‘Clueless’: Way Existential

Written by Robin Hitchcock

With Bitch Flicks celebrating its fifth anniversary this week, I wanted to write a positive and celebratory post. So I thought I would revisit one of my favorite flicks, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, for which I have not a single unkind word.

Clueless movie poster

Clueless repositions the basic plot of Jane Austen’s Emma into a Beverly Hills high school. Like Austen’s title character, Clueless‘s heroine Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is a somewhat spoiled rich girl who operates in her own reality, one slightly off-kilter from everyone else’s perception of the world. But she is not stupid, or unkind, or even particularly egotistic. Although her matchmaking and various schemes to help others are almost always somewhat self-motivated, you wouldn’t call her selfish (not to her face). Cher is an extremely likeable (and relentlessly quotable) character. This entire movie could have easily been an exercise in “look at this dumb shallow bitch,” but Heckerling’s affection for her character (echoing Austen’s for Emma) and Silverstone’s charisma sidestep that antifeminist pitfall.

Dionne and Cher

Another delightfully feminist feature of Clueless is its depiction of female friendships. There are plenty of romantic subplots to go around in this movie, but the most important relationships are between Cher and her best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) as well as Cher and her new friend/”project” Tai (Brittany Murphy). These relationships show a lot of love, mutual support, and genuine enjoyment of time spent together, reflecting real-life female friendships in a way that is STILL woefully underrepresented in media. But these friendships are not devoid of conflict or competitiveness, which also rings true. One of my favorite scenes is when Cher and Tai make up after a blowout fight, a conversation beginning with shy small talk but quickly escalating to mutual apologies and tearful appreciation of one another. Who hasn’t had this moment with their best girlfriend?

Cher and Tai make up after a fight

Clueless also boasts an exceptionally nuanced and respectful depiction of teen sexuality. When Cher, Dionne, and Tai discuss their respective levels of sexual experience (Tai has had sex, Dionne is “technically a virgin”, and Cher is “saving herself for Luke Perry”), no one’s choices are judged. Later, when Cher finds out the guy she’s crushing on is gay, she’s surprised but almost immediately embraces him as a close platonic friend.

In general, Clueless is extremely respectful of its teen characters, even as it satirizes their naïveté and superficial tendencies. Cher can be ditzy but still corrects a pretentious college student’s misquotation of Hamlet. Dionne’s boyfriend Murray is able to eloquently justify calling her “woman”: “street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronounces do have mocking, but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.” Tai marvels, “you guys talk like grown-ups.” This was three years before Dawson’s Creek forced awkwardly sophisticated through it’s teen mouthpieces, and leagues more successful.

Heckerling’s unexpected adaptation worked so well that Clueless launched an entire sub-genre of the high school-set classic literary adaptations; yielding everything from the delightful 10 Things I Hate About You (a take on The Taming of the Shrew), to the enjoyable but problematic She’s All That (one of Hollywood’s many Pygmalion adaptations), the drearily self-serious Cruel Intentions (Les Liaisons Dangereuses), and the brutally faithful O (Othello). And that’s a significantly abbreviated list (anyone else remember A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired Get Over It? Sisqó was in it! Does anyone else even remember Sisqó?). I for one would love to see a revival of this trend. If we’re going to bring back floral prints from the graveyard of the 1990s, why not this?

I strongly suspect there was some kind of magic radiation on set that dramatically slowed the aging process in the main cast, because Paul Rudd and Stacey Dash are basically the male and female poster children for “ageless,” and Alicia Silverstone and Donald Faison are still looking remarkably fresh faced themselves. [And now, I shall pour one out for gone-too-soon Brittany Murphy. RIP] But that is neither here nor there. Clueless is timeless not because of its preternaturally ageless cast, but because it is much more than just the cultural parody it appears to be at first blush.

It’s Our 5-Year Blogiversary!

BF co-founders Steph and Amber at the 2010 Athena Film Festival

We can’t believe it, but today marks five years since we started Bitch Flicks.

In March 2008, we started a blog with the wink-and-a-nudge name, Bitch Flicks. In that first year, we wrote a whopping seventeen posts, eight of which were actual film reviews.

In 2012 we published 557 posts–and “we” consisted of a dozen people, not to mention numerous guest writers.

We want to thank our Editor and Staff Writer Megan Kearns.

We want to thank our staff writers: Erin Fenner, Robin Hitchcock, Leigh Kolb, Carrie Nelson, Rachel Redfern, Amanda Rodriguez, Lady T, Max Thornton, and Myrna Waldron.

We want to thank everyone who has ever contributed to Bitch Flicks, whether by writing a post, designing a logo, donating, commenting, or sharing a piece you read with someone else.

Everyone mentioned here has been a part of what has made this project continue.

Finally, we want to thank every one of you reading this–and we hope you’ll stay with us in years to come.

–Steph and Amber

‘The Journey of Natty Gann’: Family-Friendly and Feminist-Friendly!

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

The Journey of Natty Gann

When I was a young girl, I was obsessed with the trailer for The Journey of Natty Gann (for which I will issue a spoiler warning, although I find it dubious that a Disney family film could be spoiled):

I remember popping in my VHS copy of The Sword in the Stone just to watch this trailer, sometimes three or four times in a row. It hit all my little girl id buttons: A tough kid (a tough GIRL!) on an epic adventure without the assistance of adults! Baby-faced John Cusack! A pet wolf! (I’m terribly afraid of dogs, so I’ve always weirdly loved characters who aren’t even afraid of wolves. See also, Julie of the Wolves, Young Robin’s favorite book). And yet, I never saw the actual movie before this week, through a combination of poor availability on home video and a nagging fear that the actual movie could never live up to my love for the trailer.

But when I caught The Journey of Natty Gann on South African satellite this weekend, I knew the time had come to actually watch it. And the film managed to live up to my impossibly high expectations. If you can’t stand live action Disney family films, there is nothing for you here, but Natty Gann is a fine example of the form.

For those unable to watch the trailer above, here’s a rough outline of the plot: In the middle of the Great Depression, twelve-year-old Natty Gann runs away from her neglectful reluctant caregiver (Lainie Kazan) in Chicago to find her father, who has gone out west for work. Everyone cynically tells Natty that her father abandoned her, but in truth he is a good man (despite being played by Ray Wise, who I suppose had not yet been saddled with the typecasting that has defined the last twenty years of his career) and is trying to save enough money to buy Natty a train ticket of her own to join him. Natalie faces a series of adventures along the way, picks up a pet wolf, and meets another young kid on a journey of his own, Harry (John Cusack).

John Cusack as Harry

Harry was one of the best surprises of the film for me. I’m pretty much powerless in the face of young John Cusack, but I still worried that his character might be too much of a mentor figure for Natty or merely part of a boring old romantic subplot. There are touches of both, but ultimately Harry comes across as Natty’s fellow adventurer. He thinks of himself as more street-wise (or rail-wise?) than Natty, but very quickly learns not to condescend to her.

Natty Gann (Meredith Salenger) gets her Katniss on

And Meredith Salenger is absolutely terrific as Natty Gann. Even feminist-in-training Young Robin recognized some of the problems with the “tomboy” character archetype: that the way for a girl to be cool was for to not be “girly.” What’s remarkable about the character Natty Gann as written by Jeanne Rosenberg and played by Salenger is that her personality is just that–her personality, given even rougher edges by the hard circumstances of her life. Her toughness isn’t meant to make her any less of a “real girl.” Natty struggles to be accepted as equal to adults, rather than equal to the boys. When Harry tells her, “You’re a real woman of the world, kid” we know she’s earned the respect she seeks.

The Journey of Natty Gann is a movie I’ll want my hypothetical children to see; to entertain them, teach them life lessons, and help begin their feminist indoctrination. And as an adult, I still found myself enjoying every minute of it. What more could you ask of a family film? [Perhaps the absence of an attempted rape scene, although said scene if fleeting, not exploitative, and ripe to become a Teachable Moment]

And in the meantime, let’s find Meredith Salenger her career-redefining role. She’s talented, gorgeous, and clearly a sweetheart: she tweeted me after I praised Natty Gann on Twitter while I was watching it: [I’d love to go back and time and tell Young Robin about that, although explaining Twitter to a child in the late 1980s sounds even more difficult than inventing time travel.]

Also based on Twitter, I see that Meredith Salenger is good friends with Parks & Rec‘s Retta, so I may have an idea how to go about reinvigorating her career: *cough* SPINOFF *cough*

The Journey of Natty Gann: Family-Friendly and Feminist-Friendly!

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

The Journey of Natty Gann

John Cusack as Harry

Natty Gann (Meredith Salenger) gets her Katniss on

Also based on Twitter, I see that Meredith Salenger is good friends with Parks & Rec‘s Retta, so I may have an idea how to go about reinvigorating her career: *cough* SPINOFF *cough*

Women of Color in Film and TV: ‘Eve’s Bayou’ belongs in the canon

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

Eve’s Bayou dvd cover

Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 debut as a screenwriter and director, should be seen by every movie lover, every filmmaker, every storyteller. It’s a nearly perfect narrative feat, but it only generated minor waves among film critics upon its release (although Roger Ebert did name it his Best Film of 1997), and failed to garner mainstream awards nominations (it did better at the Independent Spirit Awards and NAACP Image Awards). In the intervening sixteen years I would have expected it to build up a huge following and status as a cult classic, but it is, at best, remembered as “a contemporary classic in black cinema.”

To be fair, one of the most remarkable things about Eve’s Bayou is that it features an all-star cast of black actors (including Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Dihann Carroll, and Samuel L. Jackson), all playing characters informed by race, but not defined by it. Race and culture give Eve’s Bayou some of it’s richness and depth, but are not the main driving forces of the story. It’s sadly very rare to see a film about black people that isn’t entirely about their blackness.

Eve’s Bayou is also unusual in that it focuses on women, and is told through women’s point of view. Mainly, that of ten-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett), whose adult self provides the bookending narration: “Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain.“

The power of memory and the unreliability of perception are the main themes of Eve’s Bayou, but these themes are infused into the story without reducing its clarity or straightforwardness. A bit of magical realism is used (in one stunner of a scene, Eve’s many-times-widowed aunt recounts how one of her husbands was murdered, and both women see the events play out behind them in a mirror’s reflection as the story is told), but these devices help ground the more fantastical elements of this story (including psychic visions and voodoo).

I was reminded of last year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild while rewatching Eve’s Bayou this week, as both take place in Louisiana, contain elements of the fantastical, and feature a powerfully-realized young black girl as their main character. Beasts of the Southern Wild didn’t work for me because I felt it sacrificed storytelling at the expense of its lyricism, which may be why the brilliant plotting of Eve’s Bayou stood out for me upon this rewatch. Eve’s Bayou leads you down a path where you think you know what is going to happen, but turns those expectations on their head in a ways that are both heartbreaking and moving.

Jurnee Smollett as Eve in Eve’s Bayou

I also think Eve’s Bayou is remarkably truthful and recognizable in its depiction of childhood, with all its joys, confusions, frustrations, and fears. There are many charming moments where Eve and her older sister Cecily (Meagan Good) and younger brother Poe (Jake Smollett) torment each other in ways very relatable to anyone who grew up with siblings or other children. But this film’s depiction of the challenges of childhood go deeper: we see Eve and her siblings wanting desperately to be included with and seen as equal to the adults (sometimes in very shocking ways), but also their anxiety and discomfort with growing older and leaving childhood behind.

All in all, Eve’s Bayou is a remarkable film that should have more fame and esteem than it does. If you haven’t seen it yet, it deserves the top spot on your to-see list.

2013 Oscar Week: Searching for Sugar Man Makes Race Invisible

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Rodriguez, the central figure of documentary Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man, considered the front-runner for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards this weekend, shares the unlikely story of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure failed musician in the United States who became an icon on the other side of the planet in South Africa. Rodriguez is a figure of mystery to his fans, and urban legends bloom about his having committed suicide on stage. A group of fans seek out the truth in the 1990s, and find Rodriguez is alive, still living in poverty in Detroit, completely unaware that to a generation of South Africans, he’s a rock god.

It’s a fascinating stranger-than-fiction story that is heartwarming and inspiring: perfect subject matter for a documentary. And Searching for Sugar Man is undeniably well-crafted, building suspense and mystery in the first half of the film on the hunt for Rodriguez, yielding to a very satisfying emotional catharsis in the second half of the film, where we meet Rodriguez and his daughters and see his triumphant arrival in the land that adores him. The stand-in music videos for Rodriguez’s songs that pepper the film are gorgeous to look at and the songs themselves are a revelation. Searching for Sugar Man is an excellent film that has a huge problem: the invisibility of race.

Searching for Sugar Man is about white South Africans. This is not in of itself a problem. White South Africans have stories that deserve to be told. [I am a white American living in South Africa and I think you should hear me out, for example.] But race is an intrinsic part of any South African story, especially any apartheid-era South African story. And Searching for Sugar Man is barely interested in race. It presents white South Africans as synonymous with South Africans, which is an exceptionally outrageous instance of white cultural hegemony given this country’s very recent history of extreme racial oppression.

Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, one of the South African Rodriguez fans integral to solving the mystery of the musician’s fate, does qualify Rodriguez’s South African fans as the “white, liberal, middle-class,” but it’s a quick aside in one of many descriptions of Rodriguez’s South African ubiquity. We see how the white conservatives in the apartheid government responded to Rodriguez (by censoring his records and banning airplay). But at no point in Searching for Sugar Man do we hear from a black or coloured South African on Rodriguez (with the very small exception of a news broadcaster in archival footage). I wanted to know if Rodriguez’s influence made it outside the white bubble in apartheid-era South Africa, but Searching for Sugar Man wasn’t interested in telling me. Documentaries should not leave glaring questions unanswered.

Another South African blogger had the same curiosity, and asked a black friend about his memories of Rodriguez:

He replied that he had known of the artist, but only because he used to work in broadcasting. This short and interesting answer was essentially all I asked for; a black South African commenting on the fact that Rodriguez was virtually unknown or seemed to not have played a vital role in the lives of black South Africans. Not to prove that Rodriguez did not matter, but to acknowledge that though Rodriguez fan base was mainly white, it does not mean that black South Africans have nothing to contribute with in this particular and fascinating aspect of South Africa during apartheid. A story about Rodriguez would be incomplete without the mentioning of apartheid, and a story that talks about apartheid without including a black South African experience feels incomplete to me.

Searching for Sugar Man‘s treatment of apartheid is also limited to the white middle-class perspective. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics are said to have ignited political awakening in the white Afrikaner youth in South Africa. The white male Rodriguez fans elaborate: one saying Rodriguez’s song “The Establishment Blues” taught them the very concept of being “anti-establishment”, planting the idea that “it’s OK to protest against our society; to be angry against your society.”

Segerman adds, “Because we lived in a society where every means was used to prevent apartheid from coming to and end, this album somehow had in it lyrics that almost set us free, as oppressed peoples. Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently.”

South Africans protesting apartheid in the Soweto uprising of 1976.

While there is no doubt that the apartheid government was oppressive to all South Africans, I bristle at hearing a white man refer to himself and his Afrikaner friends as “oppressed peoples” in a film that doesn’t provide the context of how apartheid shaped the lives of people of color in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement we see in Searching for Sugar Man is one of privileged white youth rebelling against the censorship and control of their ultra-conservative government; when the fight against apartheid was a life-and-death struggle for basic human rights and freedom for millions of black and coloured South Africans.

Searching for Sugar Man‘s narrow white perspective on apartheid-era South Africa is all the more troubling because Sixto Rodriguez is himself a person of color (Mexican and Native American) living in extreme poverty in Detroit. Clarence Avant, an African American record producer who worked with Rodriguez, is the first and only person in the documentary to suggest that Rodriguez’s race may have contributed to his commercial failure in the United States. Rodriguez does not appear to be concerned with material wealth, having given away most of the money he’s earned touring after his rediscovery in the late 1990s (Since the release of this documentary, Rodriguez has embarked on a world tour). But when one compares the urban blight Rodriguez sang about on his albums to the circumstances of many South Africans two decades after the end of apartheid, the omission of their story in this documentary is even more appalling.

I’m delighted that Searching for Sugar Man has helped expose Rodriguez’s fine music to a wider audience (including myself); and as a resident of South Africa it is nice to see this country have a worldwide cultural moment. I just wish that the documentary that achieved all this was more fully and honestly representative of South Africa and its history.

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.

Fun with Stats: Best Actor/Actress Nominations vs. Best Picture Nominations

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Last year’s Best Actress and Best Actor Oscar winners, Meryl Streep and Jean Dujardin. The Iron Lady was not nominated for Best Picture. The Artist was nominated for and won Best Picture.

It’s February, which means it is the Dog Days of Oscar Season. So for this week’s post I’ve done what any obsessive fan would do: create a massive database to conduct some simplistic statistical analysis to which I will subsequently ascribe excessive importance and profundity!

Specifically, I decided to look at the Academy Awards’ 843 nominated performances for Best Actress and Best Actor over their 85-year history, and see how many of those were from films that also received a nomination for Best Picture. My hypothesis was that the movies that earn their leading ladies Best Actress nominations are less likely to be nominated for Best Picture than those films that garner Best Actor nods. I’ll speculate on some of the reasons why that might be in a bit, but first I will share the results I found:

Pie chart illustrating relationship between Best Actress nominations and Best Picture nominations

Out of the 423 performances that have been nominated for Best Actress, 153 were in films also nominated for Best Picture. This means that approximately 33.16% of Best Actress nominees were from Best Picture-nominated films. In contrast, 229 of the 420, or 54.5% of the performances nominated for Best Actor were in Best Picture-nominated films.^[1]

Pie Chart illustrating relationship between Best Actor nominations and Best Picture nominations

^[1]Some minor notes on how I calculated these figures. These are incredibly minor quirks that only the hugest of geeks would care about, so push up your glasses. I counted all of the performances for which the nominees in the first year of the Academy Awards separately, even though winners Janet Gaynor and Emil Jennings were awarded for their cumulative work. I did not include Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage in 1934, because she was not nominated even though she did come in third place through write-in votes. I separated films not nominated for Best Picture but nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the above pie charts but not in the calculation of data, because several foreign language films have received Best Picture nominations straight out (for example, this year’s Amour). You can check my work in my [Oscar Spreadsheet of DOOM, and you probably should, because my brain DID NOT want to accept the fact that The Reader was nominated for Best Picture, and that was only four years ago.

The disparity here is plainly evident but I did my statistical due diligence and ran a chi squared test, proving that the distribution of Best Picture nominations between the sub-groups of Best Actor and Best Actress deviates from what you would expect. The chi squared value here equals 28.634, with 3 degrees of freedom and a p<.0001. That's math talk for "something isn't right here." Basically, these figures offer proof of the statistical significance of Best Actor nominees more frequently appearing in Best Picture nominated films than nominees for Best Actress do.

Now let’s consider why this might be the case. Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress require more than a great performer: that performer needs a meaty role to play. What this data suggests is that the kind of movies that provide these great parts for actresses are less likely to be “Best Picture caliber” than the films that have Best Actor-worthy male roles. The films that yield Best Actress nominations are more often “small” (e.g. Frozen River, TransAmerica, You Can Count on Me) or “non serious” movies (e.g. Julie & Julia, Bridget Jones’s Diary) that aren’t as attractive to the Academy as Best Picture contenders.

2003 Best Actor winner Sean Penn (for Best Picture-nominated Mystic River) with 2003 Best Actress winner Charlize Theron (for non-nominated Monster).

Notably, in the years where there were 5 or fewer nominees for Best Picture (1927/28–1930/31, 1944–2008), the disparity between Best Actors and Best Actresses appears even greater: 109 out of 348 (31.32%) Best Actress nominations were for Best Picture-nominated films; whereas 177 out of 347 (51.01%) Best Actor nominations were for films nominated for Best Picture. The chi squared for this data set is actually a smidge lower at 27.841, but that still indicates considerable statistical significance.

Conversely, isolating the years with an expanded list of Best Picture nominees (1931/32–1943, 2009–2012) finds no statistical significance in the disparity between Best Actor and Best Actress nods correlation with Best Picture nominees. Both Best Actor and Best Actress nominees see a significant bump in the chances of their film being nominated for Best Picture: up to 71.23% for men and to 58.6% for women. The chi squared is 2.565, df=3 and p=.4637, so these results aren’t statistically significant. Unfortunately, this data set is much smaller than the other ones I looked at, and makes the strange bedfellows of the last four years of Oscars and a set of nominees from 8 decades ago, so it may need to be viewed more skeptically.

To get a better idea of how these trends might have changed over time, I also split the data into two roughly equal blocks, everything before 1970, and everything after. The good news is that the disparity had already started to narrow in the modern era even before the Best Picture nominations field expanded in recent years. When the data is split into these two groups, the earlier era gets a chi squared score of 20.037 (df=3, p<.0002), indicating extreme statistical significance; the newer data computes to a chi squared of 9.816 (df=3, p=.0202), which indicates statistical significance as well but less dramatically.

But this does not mean there has been steady progress on this front over the years. These graphs show fluctuation over the years and decades for both genders of nominee, with men remaining slightly above women most years and more substantially above women in all decades:

Charts showing disparity between Best Actor/Actress and Best Picture nominations over years and decades

To sum up: Academy Awards nominees for Best Actor have been nominated for films also nominated for Best Picture to a much greater degree than the nominees for Best Actress. In years that have a wider field of Best Picture nominees, the disparity between actors and actresses narrows to the point it is not statistically significant. The disparity has also decreased in more modern years but remains statistically significant.

I believe, optimistically, that this is more of a problem with Oscar’s past than it’s present and future. With more (but still not enough!) women filmmakers active, we’re going to see more and more women in central roles in the Big Important Pictures that tend to get nominated for Best Picture, as we have this year with Best Actress nominee Jessica Chastain at the center of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Furthermore, the expanded list of nominees for Best Picture makes room for different kinds of films, so smaller, women-centric gems like Amour, The Kids are All Right, and Winter’s Bone are included in the Best Picture nominee club. In the future, I hope the sex of a nominated performer won’t be predictive of the Best Picture nomination of his or her film. While this is certainly only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Academy’s limitations in recognizing diversity in their nominees, I’m still glad we’re seeing progress here.

Beautiful Girls, Emotionally Stunted Boys

By Robin Hitchcock

The male cast of Beautiful Girls

It always raises a red flag for me when a film presents men one way and women another. My feminist knee starts to jerk—GENDER BINARY—BIOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM—DANGER WILHELMINA ROBINSON!

So 1996’s Beautiful Girls, an ensemble belated-coming-of-age story centered around New York City pianist Willie (Timothy Hutton) returning to his hometown for a high school reunion, starts out on notice because it centers on big ideas about The Way Men Are. And that’s before it goes down an even more troubling Lolita-esque road. And yet, it’s one of my favorite movies. I’m just not sure if I should qualify it as a guilty pleasure.

The main thesis of Beautiful Girls is that men will never be satisfied with what they have because they can always imagine having something more. They’ll never be satisfied with the women the are with because there will always be other women they could be getting—prettier, younger, cooler, NEWER women. As the film’s voice-of-lunacy, Paul (Michael Rapaport) explains in the films title-bestowing monologue:

A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man – promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay.

But yearning for this promise leads these guys to neglect the women they can and do have relationships with. This is laid out without any subtlety in a quaint quasi-feminist rant oh-so-clearly written by a man in the 1990s but delivered with winning gusto by Rosie O’Donnell, who details the artifice of the women presented in a pornographic magazine and laments: “But you fucking mooks, if you think that if there’s a chance in hell that you’ll end up with one of these women, you don’t give us real women anything approaching a commitment.” The men don’t really consider that even if one of these perfect supermodels walked into their lives they might not be able to have her, which becomes abundantly clear later on.

Rosie O’Donnell as Gina in Beautiful Girls

So much of the conflict in Beautiful Girls reads as “Woe, the pain of basking in male privilege.” This can be very annoying. But the film clearly aims to critique this attitude and demonstrate that its men would be much happier if they would just settle down (emphasis on “settle”). So it’s possible that Beautiful Girls actually seeks to deconstruct gender stereotypes and attack the system which creates both the perils of the privileged and desperation of those who are not.

Timothy Hutton and Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls

But before I go any further with giving Beautiful Girls the benefit of the doubt, I should mention that the core plot thread is the main character Willie falling in love with the girl next door. The girl next door who is thirteen-years-old. RECORD SCRATCH! This thirteen-year-old neighbor, Marty (Natalie Portman), is so charming and vibrant and precocious (she explains that she has an “old soul”) that it is easy to sympathize with Willie’s creepy crush. And it helps that Willie, most of the time, knows that his feelings for Marty are skeevy and wrong. [When I first saw Beautiful Girls, I was fourteen, and had already had my share of crushes on age-inappropriate men, so I related to Marty’s impossible longing more than I worried about the inappropriateness of Willie’s. My husband watched this movie for the first time this week, at age 29 (the same age as the character Willie), and could not get past the ick factor of someone his age pining for a girl that young. So your mileage may vary regarding the possible automatic disqualification of Beautiful Girls.]

Willie has a perfectly lovely and age-appropriate girlfriend back in the city, but he can’t commit because that means giving up future chances to fall in love again before he “settles in to the Big Fade.” Willie’s infatuation with Marty represents the ultimate fantasy in the worldview of Beautiful Girls‘ men—as a girl on the cusp of womanhood she’s the ultimate in “promise”, and because of the circumstance of her age she’s completely unattainable without the pesky pain of rejection.

Uma Thurman as Andera in Beautiful Girls

Although the men in Beautiful Girls seem to take rejection almost alarmingly in stride in a no-means-yes kind of way. Uma Thurman shows up at some point as The Perfect Woman, Andera (not a typo, just an obnoxious name). She’s gorgeous, confident, funny, and smart. She shoots whiskey and knows exactly how many days there are until Spring Training begins—so we know she’s not just cool for a chick. She’s also in a committed relationship with an unseen man back in Chicago. Despite being out of everyone in town’s league and being unavailable besides, all of the male characters (except her cousin) assume they will be able to have sex with her. When Paul asks her out (she’s not aware it is a date) and takes her to a bar where he knows his ex Jan (Martha Plimpton) will be, she reiterates that she’s unavailable and uninterested, but ultimately agrees to play along as though she’s on a date with him to help make Jan jealous. To that end, Andera takes Paul to the dance floor and puts on an hot-n-heavy show. Paul responds by kissing her. She angrily leaves.

Then Andera runs into a drunk Willie, who asks her to sleep with him. She says no, and he asks again. She refuses again but does agree to go ice fishing with Willie, where she charitably tries to disabuse him of his manly notions that there will always be another better woman around the corner. He responds for propositioning her for sex yet again. For a movie that is struggling to excuse itself for presenting statutory rape as a possible happy ending, you’d think it would take it’s other representations of consent much more seriously.

Lauren Holly as Darian and Matt Dillon as Tommy in Beautiful Girls

Tellingly, consent is also a fuzzy concept for the female character Darian (Lauren Holly), former high school Mean Girl, current philandering wife, who of the women in Beautiful Girls is most in line with the male characters. Darian regularly cheats on her husband with high school flame Tommy (Matt Dillon), who is also straying from his girlfriend Sharon (Mira Sorvino). Darian crashes a surprise birthday party Sharon throws for Tommy and drunkenly throws herself at him. Tommy’s repeatedly refuses her advances which just leads Darian to up her seduction game, because she treats Tommy’s consent as foregone conclusion. As high school Queen Bee, Darian had status and privilege. So she falls into the same traps of male privilege that plague the men of Beautiful Girls. It’s one of the saving graces that keeps the film from being completely mired in Men Are From Jerkass Mars/Women Are From Long-Suffering Venus territory.

Unfortunately, only Darian gets an unequivocal smack-down when she’s soundly rejected by Tommy and told off at her high school reunion by someone she bullied. The other disillusioned-by-privilege (male) characters in Beautiful Girls either find the peace of mind to settle with the women they have, or in the case of Paul, give up the chase for the woman he lost. That this happy ending seems kind of sad belies how difficult it is to disengage from the allure of beautiful girls. The italicized and capitalized Beautiful Girls is just as frustrating and compelling as its lowercase namesake.

2013 Golden Globes Week: 2013 Cecil B. DeMille Award Recipient Jodie Foster: Credibility over Celebrity

Jodie Foster at last year’s Golden Globes

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

This weekend at the Golden Globes, Jodie Foster will be honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award to honor her lifetime achievement in cinema. At age 50, Jodie Foster is the fourth-youngest recipient of the award, but having started acting at only three years old, her career spans as long as many more senior actors, directors, and producers.

For many, Jodie Foster represents the ideal model for transitioning from child acting to an adult career. She’s also known for being one of the most private people in Hollywood, despite her nearly lifelong stardom and such high profile incidents as her stalker John Hinckley shooting President Reagan in 1981. Jodie Foster is the first “openly gay” woman to receive of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, but she has almost never publicly commented on her sexuality. She “came out” in a 2007 when she thanked then-partner Cydney Bernard while accepting an award. Foster still generally refuses to answer questions about her relationships and other aspects of her personal life, and in so doing has, against the odds, cultivated genuine movie stardom without the trappings of celebrity. This is a rare feat for anyone in Hollywood and even more unusual for a woman.

Foster’s priceless response to Ricky Gervais’ jokes about her sexuality at last year’s Globes

And there can be no doubt this has made a direct contribution to Foster’s ability to practice her craft; the piece she authored for The Daily Beast responding to the tabloid spectacle surrounding (her Panic Room co-star) Kristen Stewart’s affair with director Rupert Sanders asserts, “if I were a young actor today I would quit before I started. If I had to grow up in this media culture, I don’t think I could survive it emotionally.” Foster elaborates:

Acting is all about communicating vulnerability, allowing the truth inside yourself to shine through regardless of whether it looks foolish or shameful. To open and give yourself completely. It is an act of freedom, love, connection. Actors long to be known in the deepest way for their subtleties of character, for their imperfections, their complexities, their instincts, their willingness to fall. The more fearless you are, the more truthful the performance. How can you do that if you know you will be personally judged, skewered, betrayed?

Jodie Foster has built her career on her ability to communicate vulnerability without diminishing her dignity, a compelling balance she is able to bring to her characters partially because her talent is not eclipsed by her celebrity.

Jodie Foster in The Accused

A recurring thread in Foster’s films is the issue of credibility: her characters often have to fight to have their voices heard and stories believed, and/or to be afforded the authority and status that they rightfully deserve. In The Accused, the first film for which Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Actress, Foster plays Sarah Tobias, a victim of a brutal gang rape. The prosecuting attorney Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) makes a plea bargain deal with the perpetrators in part because she thinks Sarah makes a poor witness for a trial because she has a reputation for promiscuity and uses drugs and alcohol. Sarah has to continually reassert that she is worthy of justice and deserving of being heard, even to her ally Murphy. Ultimately, Sarah is given the platform to tell her story in the court and help secure some measure of justice toward those who assaulted her.

Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs

Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, perhaps Foster’s most celebrated role, is largely defined by her ability to command respect from a world that seems hell-bent on denying her equal status (as is astutely analyzed in this post by Jeff Vordham that previously appeared on Bitch Flicks.) Hannibal Lecter at first dismisses Clarice as a “rube,” but she wins his respect by forthrightly communicating with him through his constant attempts to play status games with her.

Like Clarice Starling, Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in Contact, is not taken as seriously by her peers and colleagues despite her merit. Arroway has to passionately fight to keep funding for her search for extraterrestrial communications. Even after the value of her research is proven by her discovery of a message from outer space, she is kept on the periphery of the (largely white and male) “in-crowd” that responds to this development. In the film’s final act, Arroway’s experience travelling through a wormhole and speaking with a representative of the alien species who sent the message is officially disavowed due to lack of evidence, although it is clear most of the characters trust the veracity of her account. Again, Jodie Foster’s gift for credibility connects the audience to her character’s struggle to be accepted and believed.

Jodie Foster fights to be believed in Flightplan

This recurring theme of asserting one’s credibility and value in the face of denial and dismissal is a fundamentally feminist motif. When she appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, Jodie Foster discussed her role in Flightplan, which also hinges on her character’s questioned credibility. The character was originally written for a man to play, and when Foster lobbied for the role she specifically noted that this conflict is inherently female: “‘There’s a point in the film where she is so bereft that she has to consider that she’s lost her mind… Well that’s a scene a man could never play. A man in a crisis like this wouldn’t question his sanity, he’d question someone else’s.”

Jodie Foster understands that as women, each of her character’s credibility is considered inherently questionable by a sexist society. In film after film, Foster infuses her characters with an authority that silences those doubts. And as such, watching Jodie Foster’s characters is often immensely satisfying to the feminist viewer. It’s fantastic to see the Hollywood Foreign Press honor her remarkable career with the Cecil B. DeMille award. Congratulations, Jodie.

‘Bachelorette’ Proves Bad People Can Make Great Characters

Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan in Bachelorette

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!]

When I saw The Hangover, around the time its sequel came out, I was disappointed they didn’t make the sequel the story of “meanwhile, the bride and her girlfriends had an even MORE wild adventure.” Some of us hoped we’d get something along those lines with Bridesmaids, which certainly was an enjoyable movie and huge step forward for female-focused comedies in mainstream Hollywood, but sometimes felt forced when it veered into the “shocking” territory of ladies pooping.

So three cheers for Bachelorette, which certainly stands on the shoulders of Bridesmaids, but makes it look tame in comparison. Bachelorette doesn’t just have its female characters do shocking things, it has the shocking characterizations. For once, we have a movie full of female characters allowed to be the horrifically selfish jerks that routinely populate dude comedies like The Hangover. It’s delightfully bracing.

For some, the ladies of Bachelorette will be too bitchy, or too similar to sexist stereotypes, to bear. Maid of Honor Regan (Kirsten Dunst) is a Type-A ice queen, joined by bridesmaids Gena (Lizzy Caplan), a self-centered fuck-up, and airhead Katie (Isla Fisher). All three enjoy drugs and casual sex, and all three can be jaw-droppingly mean. All are horrified that the bride Becky (Rebel Wilson) is getting married first among them, because, well, she’s fatter than they are. They still use the cruel nickname (“Pig Face”) they gave her in high school, and spend the first act showing shocking disregard for the her well-being and the success of her wedding. [Fortunately for the bride, there are other women in her bridal party lurking on the sidelines of the story, theoretically taking care of most of the wedding business while these three cause trouble].

Rebel Wilson is unfortunately not given much to do as Becky, but I really enjoyed how the movie didn’t just victimize her as the “fat friend”, subverting that dynamic by making it clear that Becky’s size is much more of an issue for her skinnier friends than it is for Becky herself. Although Gena awkwardly jokes in her rehearsal dinner speech about meeting Becky when she was making herself vomit in the high school bathroom, it’s later revealed that Regan is actually the one with a history of bulimia. It’s made clear that Becky doesn’t tolerate strangers being cruel to her: she puts a stop to her bachelorette festivities the moment the male stripper Katie brought in calls her “Pig Face.” Becky retains her dignity, while Gena, Katie, and Regan pathetically retreat to have their own private coke-fueled hotel room bender without the bride or the other members of the bridal party.

Rebel Wilson as the bride, a well-adjusted foil for the main characters

During this party, the girls cruelly mock the size of Becky’s wedding gown, and Regan and Katie both try to climb into it. But Becky is only twice their size in their demented imaginations, so the gown rips. The rest of the plot follows their misadventures as they attempt to fix the gown before the next morning.

Gena, Katie, and Regan never stop being selfish bitches in their quest to undo this huge wrong. A potential solution is reached when they are able to get into a bridal shop after hours and there’s another dress available in nearly Becky’s size, but it’s rejected because that dress is Regan’s favorite, and she can’t let her friend wear it instead of her. They’re also all distracted by their own romantic subplots, particularly Gena (who is paired against her former Party Down co-star Adam Scott, to the same irresistibly watchable effect).

But through all of this shocking meanness, there’s a true-to-life thread of the genuine friendship between these women. It may be hard to imagine how these characters became friends in the first place, but who didn’t build some unlikely friendships through the happenstance of high school classroom seating charts and locker assignments? And despite all their nasty behavior, it’s not hard to understand why they are still friends after all these years: Bachelorette masterfully illustrates the bond we feel with the people we’ve known the longest, even if they aren’t the closest people in our present lives. Becky and Regan will always have a bond because Becky covered up for her high school bulimia; Regan and Gena will always have a bond because Regan took Gena to get an abortion when her high school boyfriend (Scott) chickened out. In the final scenes, Regan bounces between finally putting her bitchiness to good use by chewing out Becky’s floundering florist, and saving Katie’s life after she overdoses on Xanax. Gena assures Katie’s bewildered suitor that even though he’s right that Regan is a “head case” it’s also true that “she’s a good friend.” It rings true. Regan is the kind of friend you’d never want, but you would nevertheless be grateful for if you did have her in your life.

Bachelorette has a happy ending without absolving the characters

Still, Regan, Gena, and Katie sit out Becky’s wedding ceremony, beat-down and vomit-covered on a bench, unneeded by Becky the beaming Bride. The film ends with a wedding reception coda that’s appropriately joyful, but there’s no clear-cut redemption for our troubled trio. Bachelorette strikes a delicate balance, getting us to like and root for these flawed characters without denying their shortcomings (as The Hangover and its ilk are wont to do). It’s a rare feat for any film, and almost unheard of with a female-centric comedy.