Why Can’t Films With Best Actress Contenders Win Best Picture?

The last time a film starring a woman who was also a Best Actress contender won Best Picture was in 2004, with Million Dollar Baby. Since the advent of the preferential ballot, it has seemingly become impossible for a film starring a woman who drives the narrative to win. There are two ways to look at this. The first is to believe: hey, it just worked out that way. No film with a woman in the lead has ever been good enough. Or you could look at it another way: when it comes to consensus preference, voters prefer stories about men. I’ve been pondering how Three Billboards became so controversial this year, and how films like Detroit and The Beguiled were shunned. I thought about how Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Picture and Best Director and how she was punished after that — kept back, held down, not given any sort of power or respect off that win. When Bigelow then made Zero Dark Thirty, which is ten times the film that Argo is, she was destroyed on the torture issue — honey, stand back, you can’t drive the car. She was not nominated for Best Director, which was absurd, and the industry threw a parade for Ben Affleck despite the fact that the directors branch chose not to nominate him that year. Bigelow, it seemed, “deserved” to be passed over because she made the wrong noise. Ava DuVernay was also raked over the coals for her treatment of LBJ’s legacy in Selma, where her take on the story was not valued because …

The truth about women in Hollywood as directors is this: the crusty old guard want you to be good, but just not better than they are.

It’s hard to disagree with Rose McGowan, who dismissed the wearing of black on the red carpet as a protest. Self-serving, she called it — and in a sense she’s right. If you’ve lived long enough, you know what this is, this one season where everyone is pretending like the power dynamic is going to change. They got Greta Gerwig in for Lady Bird, but Dee Rees, whose Mudbound far surpassed expectations and was equally critically acclaimed (though the critics didn’t lose their shit over it in the same way, granted) was left out, as was Bigelow’s Detroit, which is hard to watch and ambitious and dared to tell a story about America’s past that needed to be told. Somehow her telling it was worse to people than the importance of it being told at all. The reason it was ignored wasn’t because it was and remains a powerful piece of cinema — the reason it was ignored was because people rose up to unanimously protest her decision to tell it. As much as we should celebrate Gerwig’s success, we should also question why no others made it through, why no others got the same ticker tape parade.

What is it about Frances McDormand’s Mildred that so bothers people? A 60-ish woman who wears no makeup, refuses to do anything to her appearance to make herself more palatable to patriarchy, nothing to show she’s worried about whether or not men find her attractive. No makeup, weird hair, a drab jumpsuit — I saw one person call her a militant feminist. She is hardly that. She’s a hard-edged woman whose life was forged in the crucible of being beaten senseless by her husband until he finally leaves her for a 19 year-old, then fighting with her rebellious daughter who is then picked up and raped as she was murdered. You might not know the fury of that kind of combustible rage unless you had a daughter, unless you had a daughter whose life was more important to you than your own, whose life was your whole life. As someone like that, after last year’s election, after aging past fifty, I can tell you that what Mildred does in Three Billboards is a realistic depiction of someone who has had enough.

Is it ugly? Yes. Is it violent? Yes. Is it fair? No. Is it justifiable? Of course not. But all of those things can be true and Martin McDonagh writing her and bringing her alive on the big screen gives us a chance to dive back into a time when female characters on screen could have this much complexity. If we make films (and especially Oscar winning films) which only reflect our best selves, then we are nothing more than technicians in a museum recreating dioramas that depict human life as we want it be.

We want to be so many things that we aren’t. We have artists to illuminate that contradiction because we can’t do it ourselves. Mildred does not see who she is. Her grief and rage has swallowed up her humanity and she knows it. Every so often we glimpse the woman she might have been if things had gone a different way, or if she had been born somewhere other than Ebbing, Missouri.

No, it took a European man to write a female character like this — as though Mildred is actually almost human. As though she is more than the sum of her three holes. As though what she feels and thinks and does can be wholly complex, contradictory, not good or bad, but driving a film. Along similar lines, probably no American director would cast Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water, much less show her full frontally nude. Most American male writers and green-lighters need some fuckability contract on the table. Does anyone want to fuck Mildred (I mean, anyone other than Peter Dinklage) is usually the number one question when contemplating a female lead in an American film.

There is nothing cuddly about Mildred. There might not even be anything good about her. I remain shocked that this film has won as many awards as it has and that it actually has a shot to win Best Picture. But Mildred, you see, is as disposable as Kathryn Bigelow. Why? Because the Sam Rockwell character is “problematic.” And that has, for some, rendered the entire film unsavory, or too risky.

There is a beautiful shot where McDonagh has mirrored the two faces of Mildred and Dixon to show that they are two sides of the same damaged, shit-stained coin. Both are using violence for the wrong reasons, both will eventually take law into their own hands — how far will it go is the question left unanswered. They are the embodiment of rage for different reasons, from different perspectives, and taking, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar so eloquently put it, “ONE STEP.”

I can’t make the case (and never would) that Get Out doesn’t deserve to win: in fact, I’ll be making the case that it can later today or tomorrow. But if a film starring a female actress can’t win this year — with so many  brilliant options on offer — you have to wonder if they ever will.