A race to irrelevance for the Golden Globes and Academy Awards

“These are not our people, and they do not represent us.” With these words, Alma Har’el, the director of Honey Boy, proclaimed the growing irrelevance of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which will hold the Golden Globes award ceremony on January 5. This year, women have been excluded from the best director category once again. In the 77 years the HFPA has given out the awards, women have been excluded 70 times. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a similarly dismal track record, nominating just five women directors over the 90-year history of the Oscars. The stacked nature of the game is apparent when one considers the bounty of critically acclaimed features directed by women, including Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

In response to the vociferous criticism of yet another all-male slate of nominees, Lorenzo Soria, president of the HFPA, weakly submitted, “We don’t vote by gender. We vote by film and accomplishment.” In this brief declaration, Soria exercised his privilege to deny any responsibility for a system built on the biases of individuals while simultaneously attempting to claim the moral high ground. His denial implies the awards process is based on merit, rather than on the preferences of a select group possessing a particular point of view. When asserting this privilege of denial, he signaled a lack of interest in changing his organization’s practices and a myopic devotion to tradition. While this type of response can be marginally effective in buying time, the strategy inevitably marks the organization as being remarkably out of touch with its own predispositions and a changing environment. As Har’el recently told Variety, members of the major grant-awarding organizations “have no awareness at all” of their own biases. “They don’t pay attention to new voices or value them in the same way they value men they are familiar with.”

If Soria’s statement sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard this sort of posturing before from festival executives trying to justify programs heavily favoring films directed by men. In 2019, when the Venice International Film Festival included a scant two films directed by women in its competition, fest director Alberto Barbera stated to Reuters, “The only criteria I can use selecting a film is the quality of the film, or the film itself, and I don’t think that any other concerns should enter into the selection process.” 

While the Golden Globes and Oscars have traditionally served as relatively potent arbiters of film quality and talent, their reluctance to acknowledge and honor women filmmakers diminishes their influence and marginalizes their awards. In recent years, the Academy has received a good deal of attention regarding its efforts to increase the percentage of women, who now make up 32% of voting members. But the organization has failed to nominate a woman in eight of the nine years since Kathryn Bigelow became the first and only woman to ever win a best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker.

The HFPA and Academy seem intent on racing toward their own irrelevance. Ironically, it would be a race that no one would actually want to win.