Wesley Lovell on Women at the Oscars

Critic and @oscarguy Wesley Lovell has a thoughtful assessment of women at the Oscars on CinemaSight. While the most-nominated and most-won individuals include women (costume designers Edith Head, Irene Sharaff, Catherine Martin, and Colleen Atwood, actors Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn, the overall statistics are grim:

In Oscar history, there have been 7,177 films nominated with at least one individual cited. There have been, overall, 11,602 total individuals nominated for Academy Awards. On the single film side, 1,163 films (16.20%) have featured a nomination slate that included at least one woman. 989 of those films were comprised of at least half women. More than half of the nominee slate was women in 534 cases and in a situation where all of the nominees were women, there were 497 instances. On the individual side, 1,321 women (11.28%) have ever been nominated.

On the winners side, we have a worse picture. There have been 4,350 individuals who have won Academy Awards over the years. 332 of those have been women (7.63%)

No woman cinematographer has ever been nominated. Only one woman has won a Best Directing Oscar, Katherine Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker.” Fewer than two percent of the nominees for composers have been women.

There are so many good candidates this year, including “Lady Bird” writer/director Greta Gerwig, “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins, and first-time screenwriter (“The Post”) Liz Hannah. Let’s hope we can improve on the dismal numbers Lovell has made impossible to overlook.