Art is subjective, but it’s hardly contestable to say that women have directed some of the best films of 2017. Dee Rees’s post-WWII epic Mudbound is not just a visceral tour de force but a technical triumph. Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman is pushing Warner Bros’s 2017 box office earnings past $5 billion. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird broke a Rotten Tomatoes record, before finally being stripped of its perfect 100% score last week thanks to one Cole Smithey of ColeSmithey.com, self-described “Smartest Film Critic in the World.” None of these women will earn a Golden Globe for Best Director this award season, because all five of the nominees are men.
The above films weren’t totally shut out of the award nominations. Gerwig was nominated for Best Screenplay, Saoirse Ronan for Best Actress, and Laurie Metcalf for Best Supporting Actor. Mary J. Blige also picked up a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Mudbound. But the Globes’s commitment to completely ignoring women directors is almost impressive. Only three women have been nominated for Best Director in the past 20 years, and none of them have won. Ironically, one of those nominees was Sofia Coppola, for her 2003 film Lost in Translation. Coppola’s 2017 opus — The Beguiled — picked up zero Golden Globes nominations this year, despite Coppola becoming the second woman ever to win Best Director at Cannes.
There is a depressing lack of diversity in the list too. Get Out director Jordan Peele — who recently called out Universal’s decision to submit his blockbuster to the Golden Globes’s Best Comedy category — was not nominated for Best Director. (“White privilege is watching Get Out and thinking it was funny,” one fan tweeted.”) Besides The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro, who is Mexican, all the nominated directors are white.
The Golden Globes aren’t totally blind to the shifting power dynamics in Hollywood. One of the organization’s most interesting decisions was to nominate Christopher Plummer for Kevin Spacey’s role in All the Money in the World. It’s hard to give the Globes props when they’re still failing to recognize women’s stories.