Let it never be said that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone doesn’t have a pair of cast-iron cojones. If you doubt this, read her Golden Globe reaction piece that went up late last night — “The Clickbait Outrage Machine Goes into Overdrive Post Globes.”
It’s one of the bravest and frankest essays ever written about the real-deal terms of female filmmaker empowerment in Hollywood. It’s a piece that only a tough woman columnist could have written. If I’d posted this on HE I would have been torn limb from limb by twitter jackals, and the buzzards would be feasting on the leftovers ten minutes later. But Sasha has the authority.
Yesterday I deftly debated the “gender parity watchdogs” who had howled in protest over four top-ranked female directors — Little Women‘s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell‘s Lulu Wang, Hustler‘s Lorene Scafaria and It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood‘s Marielle Heller — not being nominated for a Golden Globe Best Director award, and their films not being nominated for Best Motion Picture, Drama.
I stated that The Farewell is a highly superior film, but also argued that a reasonably convincing case couldn’t be made for Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers “being more transporting or historic or eye-opening” than Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Sam Mendes‘ 1917 or Todd Phillips‘ Joker. I also said it would be a push to convince people that Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Hustlers “are fuller meals or more humanist or more grounded in human vulnerability.”
That was as far as I felt I could go. But then Sasha’s piece appeared last night and made me look…well, like a guy who needs to be careful.
Because Sasha just said it. She basically argued that feminist industry progressives and their Film Twitter component are doing women no favors by insisting that a gender parity quota system should be observed when it comes to award nominations.
Film Twitter is basically declaring that (a) there must be some female award-show representation “so those involved can sleep at night, knowing that yes, Virginia, there is gender parity in Hollywood,” (b) not nominating women for awards is unacceptable, and (c) that those who defy this revolutionary mandate will have to pay a price.
“’Pick a woman, any woman‘ seems to be the message,” Sasha wrote. “Because if that happens [award-giving orgs] are shielded from attacks.
“I have no doubt that the clickbait cycle so prevalent today will seek to put Oscar voters on notice in the 11th hour, urging them to choose one of these [female-directed] movies for good optics, to shield them from the kind of heat the Globes got burned with [on Monday].
A Stone paragraph that will live forever: “If I were a woman I wouldn’t want anyone to do me any favors. I would want to make a movie SO GOOD that its value was undeniable. Like Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker, like Jane Campion’s The Piano, like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, like Ava DuVernay’s Selma.**
“Voters should focus on choosing the best films or the best directors or the best scripts. But none of that matters to Film Twitter, which then is the feeder trough for clickbait all over the web.
Another historic Stone statement: “It seems like in our overriding desire to level the playing field we’ve decided that there is no absolute measure of what’s good and what isn’t, and that’s been replaced by a sliding scale that adjusts to factor in equality, parity, and inclusion.”
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