Sofia Coppola is the first American woman to receive three Oscar nominations: best film, best director and best screenplay for the film Lost in Translation. But what are the chances of her actually winning?
Since 1927, when the Academy Awards began, no woman has ever won best director. Only two have received nominations — New Zealander Jane Campion for The Piano (1993) and Italian Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties (1976). In best picture, the producer’s category, three women have won, but only as part of a team. Forrest Gump (1994) was produced by Wendy Finerman with two men; Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and The Sting (1973) were both produced by husband-and-wife teams.
The chances of a woman winning best screenplay are a bit better. Five women have won: Jane Campion for The Piano (1993) and Callie Khouri for Thelma and Louise (1991) were solo winners. Two more husband-and-wife teams collected awards for Witness (1985) and The Seventh Veil (1946), and a woman collaborated on the script of the 1955 winner, Interrupted Melody.
So women who work with male collaborators and are also married to writers or producers have a definite advantage. The situation is similar in the best-adapted-screenplay category. Here, four women have won: Emma Thompson for Sense and Sensibility (1995), Ruth Jhabvala for Howards End (1992) and A Room with a View (1986). Then we have to go all the way back to Miniver (1942) to find Claudine West, who collaborated with three men, and 1933 when Sarah Mason worked on the script of that most loved of women’s novels, Little Women.
Interestingly, 11 of the 75 screen- play adaptations to have won Oscars were from novels or plays written by women, including Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, Casablanca by Joan Alison, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Little Women by Louisa M Alcott and Cimarron by the great writer of westerns, Edna Ferber. But despite the commercial success of these female writers, the industry still chose, in most cases, to hire male screenwriters.
The lot of the vast majority of women screenwriters and directors in the United States and Britain remains bleak. The most recent US survey of the 250 top-grossing films shows only 3% directed by women in 1987, rising to 6% in 2001. The situation for women screenwriters is similar, with 7% in 1987, rising to only 8% in 2001. So why is it that during a period when feminism has made significant inroads into most professions, the film industry remains so male-dominated?
One answer is economic — the greater the commercial pressures, the more scared the studio chiefs become of taking risks. This is, of course, a vicious circle. Women are seen as a risk because they lack experience, which prevents them gaining experience.
Yet in recent years, three of the most powerful Hollywood studio chiefs have been women: Sherry Lansing, Stacey Snider and Amy Pascal. Possibly the role of studio chief, like managers of large corporations, may not be so much in conflict with traditional perceptions of “women’s natural role”.
As Margaret Thatcher used to say, with her famous handbag slung over her arm, running the country is merely an extension of running a household budget. Women at the top in film are under the same commercial pressures as men and so most are similarly reluctant to take risks by employing other women.
This challenges a hopeful assumption made in 1984 in a Commission for European Communities report on women in the media: “With a higherproportion of women in decision-making positions, programmes will picture a rather different world than that based on a predominantly male perspective … the images of women depicted will change to depict women — at least more of the time —as they see themselves.”
The problem for women screenwriters and directors is complex. Women have always been one of the favourite subjects of male film-makers, along with war, crime, horror and cowboys. Most on-screen portrayals of male-female relationships are written and directed by men. Therefore they naturally show a male point of view with, often, stereotypical images of women being either adored or punished.
The challenge for women film-makers is to project their own identity, free from the roles that men have allocated them, when they themselves are still subject, sociologically and psychologically, to the cultural norms they are questioning.
Most Oscar winners are drawn from the commercial mainstream of the industry — the very sector where, in order for women to make films at all, they naturally resort to self-censorship and adapt their ideas to suit a marketplace that has always thrived on fantasy images of women rather than engaging with women’s real concerns.
The exception is best foreign film, where nominations are more often drawn from the smaller-budget independent sector. This is also the area where European women directors, more free from mainstream market pressures, are flourishing. So it’s not surprising that the only women writer-directors to win Oscars have been Europeans: Marleen Gorris from the Netherlands for Antonia’s Line (1995), and Caroline Link from Germany for Nowhere in Africa (2003).
Ironically, Coppola’s chances of actually winning an Oscar for best director or best picture may be greater if she were foreign. But as the daughter of a producer, and Hollywood godfather to boot, she may well walk away with best screenplay. Whether this is a breakthrough for feminism depends on what you think of the film. — Â