Oscar 2007 Nominations: Some Good
News, But Slow Progress for Women
There are more women Oscar nominees to root for this year, and the charming and outspoken Ellen DeGeneres should be a lively host for the 2007 Academy Awards ceremony. There is good news in the Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short Subject categories, but women writers and directors are still not getting the recognition they deserve in most of the feature film categories.
Best Motion Picture:
Last year, four of the five films nominated for Best Motion Picture focused almost entirely on the male characters. This year, two of the films have extraordinary women characters in their titles and at the center of their plots - The Queen, with Helen Mirren as the powerful Queen Elizabeth II, and Little Miss Sunshine, with Abigail Breslin as a wonderfully determined and plucky young girl.
Also, two of the films nominated for Best Motion Picture had women in key off-screen roles. Little Miss Sunshine was
co-directed by Valerie Faris and her husband, Jonathan Dayton. Letters from Iwo Jima was written by Iris Yamashita.
Best Director:
Once again, no women were nominated for Academy Awards in the Achievement in Directing category - continuing the neglect that has been an annual tradition for 76 of Oscar's 79 years.
Best Writers:
There was also no improvement in the number of women writers nominated in the three closely-watched categories of Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Last year, Diana Ossana, the co-writer of Brokeback Mountain, was the only female writer nominated in those categories. This year Iris Yamashita is the only one.
Best Foreign Film:
Water, a film by and about women, is one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Film. Written and directed by the ever-amazing Deepa Mehta, Water is a poignant film about a group of widows in India who are shunned by the rest of society during the early days of Gandhi's rise to power.
Also in the Best Foreign Film category, After the Wedding was directed and co-written by Susanne Bier.
Best Documentaries and Best Documentary Shorts:
Women tackled tough topics and won three of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature: Deliver Us From Evil, by Amy Berg and Frank Donner, about pedophilia among Catholic priests; Jesus Camp, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, about a summer camp for Evangelical Christian children; and My Country, My Country, by Laura Poitrus and Jocelyn Glatzer, about a Sunni doctor in Iraq.
In the Best Documentary Short category, women are co-producers for all four nominated films: The Blood of Yingzhou District, by Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon; Recycled Life, by Leslie Iwerks and Mike Glad; Rehearsing a Dream, by Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon; and Two Hands, by Susan Rose Behr and Nathaniel Kahn.
Best Animated Short Film:
There were no women nominees in the Best Animated Feature Film category, but there was one woman in the Best Animated Short Film category. Torill Kove is nominated for The Danish Poet, which is about a young poet in search of inspiration who travels to Norway to meet Sigrid Undset, a celebrated woman writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.
To see the complete list of Oscar nominees, please visit:
www.Oscars.com.
Other News
Movies by Women Launches Video Podcasts:
Our friends at Movies By Women.com have officially launched the MoviesByWomen.com Podcast Channel. The first three podcasts include interviews with Joey Lauren Adams and Ashley Judd about Come Early Morning, Alexandra Lipsitz about Air Guitar Nation,
and Karen Moncrieff about The Dead Girl. Check it out at: www.moviesbywomen.com/podcasts.php
Also, Movies By Women.com is featured in Josh Friedman's article, "Directing Gender Buzz," that ran on the cover of the Business section of the Los Angeles Times on Monday, February 19, 2007. The article discusses the impact of grassroots efforts like Movies By Women.com's new podcast channel and their First Weekender's Group Weekly Reader, a newsletter designed to build audiences for films directed by women. You can read the article at:
www.moviesbywomen.com/press_20070219_latimes.php
The Fund for Women Artists Teams Up with WITASWAN
Martha Richards, the Executive Director of The Fund for Women Artists, will team up with Jan Lisa Huttner, a Chicago film critic and the founder of WITASWAN (Women in the Audiences Supporting Women Artists Now) this spring. Martha and Jan will do a presentation at the Illinois state convention of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in Bloomington, Illinois on Saturday, April 28. The title of the presentation will be Building a Culture to Call Our Own: Our Power as Women in the Audience. If you would like to attend this presentation but you are not a current member of AAUW, please write to info@WomenArts.org .
WITASWAN (www.films42.com/witaswan.asp) is an informal alliance of women who have pledged to help women filmmakers break through the barriers that restrict their opportunities in Hollywood and beyond. WITASWAN members make a commitment to do their best to see at least one film every month directed and/or written by a woman, either in a theater or on DVD/VHS.
We will be asking the members of AAUW-Illinois to take the WITASWAN pledge and encouraging them to support women in other art forms as well.
Meet Executive Director Martha Richards
Martha Richards will be travelling this spring to various conferences and meetings around the country. If you would like to meet her while she is in your area, please email us at info@WomenArts.org. Since she will be raising funds and seeking input about our programs and services, your help in organizing a gathering of artists or a fundraising event will be especially valuable. Her current travel schedule is:
March 23 & 24 - In New York City for the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Center's mission will be to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions.
The 8,300-square-foot space will be the permanent home of The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, in addition to housing a computerized study area, a biographical gallery, and spaces for other exhibitions of feminist art and educational presentations. (www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/eascfa.php)
March 30 - April 1 - In Louisville, Kentucky, for the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. This year's festival will feature full length plays by Alice Tuan, Sherry Kramer, and Naomi Iizuka, as well as short pieces by Constance Congdon, Kia Corthron, Kathryn Walat, Deb Margolin, and Julie Marie Myatt.
(www.actorstheatre.org/humana.htm)
April 24 - 26 - In Seattle, Washington, for the Women's Funding Network annual conference and other meetings.
(www.wfnet.org)
April 28 - May 2 - In Bloomington, Illinois, for the American Association of University Women's Illinois State Convention on April 28, and in the Chicago area for other meetings from
April 29 - May 2. (www.aauw-il.org/index.html)
About The Fund for Women Artists
The Fund for Women Artists is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women artists get the resources they need to do their creative work. There is an overview of our goals and services in the About Us section of our website at www.WomenArts.org.
The Fund for Women Artists is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Federal Employer I.D. #04-3257661. All contributions are tax deductible to the full extent of the law.
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