Barbra Streisand, Kathryn Bigelow and Gender Politics: Oscar 2010

Kathryn Bigelow, Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand, who was almost nominated for a Best Director Oscar a couple of times in the past, was chosen to present the 2010 Best Director Oscar at Sunday’s ceremony. "From among the five gifted nominees tonight, the winner could be, for the first time, a woman," Streisand told the audience at the Kodak Theatre. And just in time, too: Monday, March 8, was International Women’s Day. After looking at the name inside The Envelope, Streisand editorialized, "Well, the time has come."
For the first black filmmaker to win the Best Director Oscar? For the first openly gay filmmaker to win the Best Director Oscar? (Lee Daniels in both instances.) Or perhaps even for the first [...]

by Andre Soares | March 8, 2010   
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Lauren Bacall and the 1997 Academy Awards

In By Myself and Then Some, Lauren Bacall’s updated and extended version of her 1978 bestselling autobiography By Myself, the two-time Tony Award-winning actress (for Applause in 1970 and for Woman of the Year in 1981) candidly discusses the ballyhoo surrounding her very first Academy Award nomination in the mid-1990s.
Apart from a few (film) career lulls, Bacall had been working steadily in front of the camera since 1945. But whether as mere on-screen decoration (Key Largo, Bright Leaf) or as a solid leading lady (Woman’s World, The Fan), Bacall had been invariably ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
More than half a century after Bacall’s film début in To Have and Have Not, actress-director-composer-singer-etc. [...]

by Andre Soares | February 11, 2005   
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