Through Her Lens: 2014 (The 87th Oscars)

A series by Juan Carlos Ojano. Introduction / Explanation

The 87th Oscars was the season that #OscarsSoWhite was born. When all 20 acting nominees were all white,  lawyer April Reign took to Twitter to express her disappointment about the nominations. Exacerbating the issue that season was the presence/non-presence of the historical drama Selma. Despite a Best Picture nomination, the film missed nominations in all but one other category, with the most visible snubs being in Best Director (Ava DuVernay) and Best Actor (David Oyelowo). The tweets and hashtag prompted a snowballing industry-wide discussion on the lack of representation and racism at the Academy Awards and in Hollywood in general.

The lack of Oscar nomination for DuVernay, despite critical acclaim and Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominations, continue the then-long streak of female directors missing out in the Best Director category. Out of the 320 films included in the Reminder List of Eligible Films in 2014 (87th Academy Awards), only 40 (12.5%) were directed/co-directed by women...

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Sundance: 'Hatching' or Mommy Issues – The Movie

by Cláudio Alves

Motherhood is a subject ripe for horrific extrapolation. Some might regard their offspring as hopeful mirrors, wishing them to be an improved reflection. Disappointment, when it unavoidably comes, is a spiky cruel monster. There are others for whom birthing a mirror is the worst possible fate, the child a magnifying glass of perceived faults. Moreover, the similarity can feel draining, a youthful leech sucking out its mother's lifeforce, a constant reminder of mortality. Hanna Bergholm's Hatching takes these perceptions of motherhood and mixes them with body horror, cranks them up to eleven, and ties everything up in a pink satin bow that reeks of vomit and discarded flesh…

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FYC: Ruth Negga in "Passing"

by Cláudio Alves

Earlier in the awards season, I became discouraged at the thought that the year's best performance was doomed. Critics didn't rally behind Ruth Negga as I had hoped, and her film, no matter how spellbinding, looked likely to be ignored. Despite such worries the arrival of prominent Oscar precursors and industry awards has revitalized hope. After Globe and SAG nominations, Negga is poised to earn a second Academy Award nomination for her supporting turn as Clare Bellew in Rebecca Hall's cinematic adaptation of Nella Larsen's novel Passing. But of course, even when a nod feels secure, it's never a bad idea to gild the lily and remind folks of an actress's genius…

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Through Her Lens: 2015 (The 88th Oscars)

A series by Juan Carlos Ojano. Previous Episodes: 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | Introduction / Explanation

The sting of the #OscarsSoWhite movement from the 87th Oscars continued as no people of color were nominated in the acting categories for the second consecutive year. Idris Elba won the SAG for Supporting Actor for Beasts of No Nation, but Netflix was a completely new player at the time and unable to get traction in the Oscar race. Jada Pinkett Smith called for an Oscar boycott after her husband Will Smith missed in Actor, but his film Concussion had disappointed at the box office and received mixed reviews. The tension was high enough that The Hollywood Reporter even felt the need to clarify that “there [were] no minority actresses in genuine contention for an Oscar [that] year”.

The lack of diversity extended to gender in Best Director (the subject of this series) where no female directors were in the conversation with the arguable exception of Angelina Jolie early on before By the Sea began to screen...

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Through Her Lens: 2016 (The 89th Oscars)

A series by Juan Carlos Ojano. Previous Episodes: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | Introduction / Explanation

This year at the Oscars marked a landmark in representation. Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight became the first Best Picture winner to star an all-Black cast and the first that was LGBTQ+-themed. This win was even more remarkable as the film went up against the heavily nominated frontrunner La La Land, a romantic musical. This year also marked an unprecedented amount of racial representation in the acting categories, with seven out of 20 nominees being non-White, two of them winning.

However, this considerable victory in diversity did not extend to gender. In the directing category  all the nominees were male. At the time, not much discourse and coverage was given to gender as the focus on representation was mostly around race, especially after the two-year run of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign...

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