Jen Peikoff wrote to ask, with a note of desperation in every pixel…
Please, please, you must help me understand something. When it comes to understanding Hollywood and show biz, I figure if you can't explain something, no one can. In the Oscar nominations just out, Little Women was nominated for Best Picture but its writer-director Greta Gerwig was not nominated as Best Director. If it wins as the Best Picture, doesn't that mean she was the Best Director? Why wasn't she nominated?
Well, first of all, I doubt it will win for Best Picture. I don't get that there's a lot of "buzz" around it in that direction but that's just a hunch. You're right that it would be an injustice if it did win and she didn't win Best Director right alongside it.
Secondly, there are two very real reasons for the discrepancy here, one being that a different pool of voters vote in each of those categories…
Imagine you go to party one evening and you poll everyone at that party as to what their favorite candy is. There's some debate and a wide range of opinions but at the end of your voting, it's determined that most people at this party like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Okay, fine.
Then the next evening, you go to a different, larger party. Some of the same people who were at last night's party are there but so are a lot of other folks. Again, you poll the assemblage and this time, the clear winner is M&Ms. Would you be stunned and wonder why the two polls yielded different results? Of course not.
But that's how Oscar nominations work. The Best Director nominees are selected by the Directors Branch of the Academy and the Best Picture nominees are selected by the entire voting membership. That's how come there were two different outcomes…that and the fact that the Academy nominates five directors for Best Director and between five and ten movies for Best Picture. There's the other reason.
They nominated nine films this year for Best Picture. That means that at least four of the men and women who directed movies up for Best Picture were not going to be nominated for Best Director. Simple math. The directors of Best Picture nominees Ford v. Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit and Marriage Story also did not make the cut.
It's a basic fact of something like the Oscars that a lot of good work doesn't make the cut. They nominate five men as Best Actor. If there are twelve outstanding performances in a given year, they nominate five of them. If some year the acting is really lousy and there are only three good performances, they will still nominate five.
This kind of thing can never be without its anomalies. Consider the fact that nominations can have less to do with what the person did than something like when the movie was released…which is out of their control. If Bohemian Rhapsody had come out a few months later and been part of this year's Oscars instead of last year's Oscars, Rami Malek probably would have snagged one of the five Best Oscar nominations this time and either Antonio, Leonardo, Adam, Joaquin or Jonathan would not have made the list even though the work they did would have been just as fine.
You can't take this stuff that seriously. If your concern is that women are getting "snubbed" (that's the wrong word but everyone uses it), that's a valid concern but probably more about being hired at all than winning awards. Greta Gerwig helmed a very successful movie that was very well reviewed, there's a good chance she'll take home a Best Screenplay statuette…and she probably already has plenty of offers, as well as a lot more clout than she had before. I would be more concerned for the women who aren't getting the opportunities to direct or write. Or at least the same opportunities they'd have if they were guys.
