Sunday night at the Oscars served as a galvanizing moment for women in Hollywood, and how we can chart our own paths going forward. One of Hollywood’s most aggressive advocates for diversity, Ava DuVernay, praised the 90th Oscars as an important marker of change.
“Dear @Academy, Inclusion looks good on you,” Ms. DuVernay wrote on Twitter on Sunday night. “Well-done. More to come.”
Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and Annabella Sciorra delivering a powerful Time’s Up call to arms. Frances McDormand throwing down the gauntlet for show business with two words: “Inclusion rider.”
“If I may be so honored to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me tonight,” she said, imploring the room with her arms spread. “The actors … the filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographer, the composers, the songwriters, the designers! Come on!”It doesn’t end here,” … and I think the inclusion rider will have something to do with that.”
Ms. Frances McDormand said backstage after winning the best actress Oscar for her I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore character in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
“The inclusion rider is something actors put into their contracts to ensure gender and racial equality in hiring on movie sets. We should support this for a billion reasons, but if you can’t find a reason to, here’s one: it will make movies better,” writes Whitney Cummings on Twitter.
Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph taking the stage in Ugg slippers: Enough with those high heels. Jane Fonda likening the kaleidoscopic Oscars set to the Orgasmatron from her sexy ’60s-era “Barbarella,” which has long been scorned as being retrograde to women.
The night was also marked with another “Firsts,” Rachel Morrison, who was the First Woman Nominated for best cinematography in the history of the Academy Awards. Ms. Morrison, nominated for her work on “Mudbound,” and the cinematographer for “Black Panther,” the Marvel smash hit. We also note last year’s Ava DuVernay, the First Black Woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
Ms. Anderson-Lopez, who won best song with her husband, Robert Lopez, and said from the stage:
“I really want to take a minute to look at this category of incredible nominated songwriters tonight. Not only are we diverse, but we are close to 50-50 for gender representation. When you look at a category like ours, it helps us imagine a world where all the categories look like this one.”
Although, men still made up the vast majority of winners on Sunday night at the 90th Academy Awards, the evening will go down in the Hollywood history books as the moment when women — finally, forcefully and, they dearly hope, forevermore — seized the film industry’s reins and made it clear they would be doing and saying and being anything they wanted.
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