Oscars

Good morning! Here's the list of feminist news on our radar this morning! 

• It's been 365 days since Trayvon Martin was shot. Colorlines documents the acts of kindness and resistance that have come from the shooting in that year. 

• With rape so prevelant on reservations, how can Congress consider stripping back new protections for Native American survivors of domestic violence? 

• Speaking up about military assault: An Air Force veteran details how the military's structure enabled the crime against her. 

• You go guys! A Boston frat rallies to raise thousands of dollars for their transgender brother's surgery.

• Did anyone watch the MAKERS documentary last night on PBS? What'd you think?

• Who are the Black female comic book superheroes? 

• Oooo! Feminist summer camp! 

• Was the Oscars song "We Saw Your Boobs" offensive or just unfunny?  

• Let's send the Oscars a message! Our letter demanding five changes at the awards has 960 signatures. Let's take it to 1,000 today! 

Beasts of the Southern Wild is the only film I’ve seen of this year’s Best Picture Nominees. As someone who was once a little black girl who loved fantasy, I had to see it.

When Quvenzhané Wallis started filming her starring role as Hushpuppy, she was only five years old, just a year older than my daughter is now. About 15 minutes into the movie, I commented to my husband that Hushpuppy reminded me so much of our daughter. Like Hushpuppy, our girl has a fabulous head of curls and a penchant for running around without pants (we keep that indoors, don’t worry). And like Hushpuppy and Quvenzhané herself, she’s independent, determined, and brimming with energy and confidence.

So it broke my heart when I saw The Onion’s “joke” calling Quvenzhané Wallis one of the most hateful words you can call a girl or a woman in the English language. On top of being sad and appalled for Wallis and her family, I also couldn’t help but think of my daughter and the inevitable day that she will hear that word directed at her for the first time.

Last night’s Oscars ceremony was a hostile shitshow. Which is too bad, because if the night wasn’t marred by sexist jokes, all the headlines today should have been about the fabulous Jennifer Lawrence.

She contorted faces into the red carpet cameras, face-planted up the stairs in her tricky couture gown, and confessed that she literally wrecked herself with a shot of swill on an empty stomach before the post-show press question roundup. If you aren’t enamored with Jennifer Lawrence already for her steadfast refusal to take herself seriously under any circumstances, or for her acting chops, you have to concede this: when she used the arm not wrapped around her Oscar statuette to extend a middle finger on her way to the press microphone, she made the Oscars’ tedious and ugly into a platform for how she actually felt.

BOOM. I love her. She might as well have been playing cupid in the Hunger Games, loosing arrows into my heart.

Lawrence has repeatedly addressed the media’s reduction of the healthy female body to skin and bones with the self-effacing and defiant assertions to the mainstream women’s lifestyle magazines. Elle notoriously quoted her in their December cover story, “In Hollywood, I’m obese. I’m considered a fat actress. I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach.”  

As for the rest of her body, she has quickly accumulated enough physical skill to become a superhuman—without obsessing solely about her body.. In her training for the Hunger Games, she had to learn archery, hand-to-hand combat, and trained without dieting, saying “You can’t work when you’re hungry, you know?” Director David O. Russell mentioned her endurance during her Silver Linings choreography training and and yet she “wants to punch people” who talk about how much they love working out.  

Another big reason to love Lawrence: She takes on great roles. Her characters in Winter’s Bone and the Hunger Games are complex and interesting. In playing the role she won for last night, Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook, it’s clear she takes her job and her responsibility extremely seriously. Without as smart and compassionate an actress, Tiffany’s role could easily have slipped into being a manic pixie dream girl.

In all honestly, Lawrence is one of those rare people who make it big in Hollywood and who we all still feel like could be the friend we could drive around with on a Friday night, cracking jokes about fitness clubs and wheatgrass addicts.  

So, Jennifer Lawrence, brush off the haters. There are a lot of us who can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. We'll be your best friend/backup whenever you need it. 

More reading: Our illustrated ode to Jennifer Lawrence's character Tiffany. 

Scarlett O'Hara and her mammy in Gone with the Wind. 

With their Oscar wins last night, Django Unchained and Lincoln have taken their places in the top-tier pantheon of Hollywood’s slavery films.  As Official Slavery and Jim Crow Epics, both films have the full support of the Hollywood machine, enjoying obscene budgets and lengths, and use the power of image and story to re-create the history of the eras. They also both, in my opinion, absolve the white majority of guilt for upholding systemic labor exploitation. 

Slavery and Jim Crow Epics are a whole mini-genre in Hollywood. These films are often released in an important anniversary year and rake in the box office dollars, and often  wind up hindering meaningful conversation about the legacy of slavery. Whether the films employ benevolent omission or base humor, these versions of America’s racial history continue to write African Americans out of the scene.

Here is a brief history of America Slavery and Jim Crow Epics, from 1915 to the present. 

Last night was the Academy Awards, which means my Facebook feed was awash in comments from high school acquaintances along the lines of, “WTF was up with Kristen Stewart!?!? She was totally frowning and had some kind of bruise on her arm!!! What a slut!!! #TeamEdward.”

In my opinion, there were lots of moments last night more notable that Kristen Stewart’s facial expression. Here’s my list for best and worst moments from the interminable broadcast:

Loved It: Quvenzhané Wallis. The 9-year-old star of Beasts of the Southern Wild was the youngest Best Actress nominee to date. Not only did she rock a stuffed puppy dog handbag on the red carpet, she was unabashed in the fact that she was damn proud of herself. When they announced her name along with the likes of Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Emmanuelle Riva and Naomi Watts, Wallis spared viewing audiences the false modesty of batting eyelashes, shrugged shoulders and downcast eyes. Instead, she flexed her arms like a champion and grinned.

Hated It: So many of host Seth MacFarlane’s jokes! 

Good morning! Hopefully you're recovering from spending four long hours watching the Oscars last night. Gah! Here's your list of feminist news for today. 

• The White Male Vote: The NYTimes put together this composite picture of the 117 men who will vote for the next pope. Not surprising! [NYTimes]

• Most mass shootings don't get national headlines—they're domestic violence situations where the victims are women and family members. [AlterNet]

• Women's groups in Britain are petitioning to change sexist coverage in the nation's infamous tabloids. [Change.org]

• The Oscars were pretty "bro-tastic." [Feministing] 

• Satricial newspaper The Onion has finally discovered a line not to cross: their tweet joking that beloved actress Quvenzhane Wallis is a "cunt" quickly got deleted. This is the only time I can remember The Onion issuing an apology. [Daily Beast + Slate]

• Actually, it seems like a lot of people have beef with the nine-year-old for some reason. [Racialicious] 

• Over on Jezebel, one feminist porn star tells her story about how she got into the business. [Jezebel] 

• The show Scandal seems to actually have a good female, African-American lead character. [Bitch Flicks]

• An interesting forum over on Colorlines: Does Beyonce need to talk about her blackness? [Colorlines] 

• Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg wants to be the "pom pom girl for feminism," but columnist Maureen Dowd notes that critics say her vision is a bit elitist. [NYTimes]

Mad about sexism at the Oscars? Sign our letter telling the Academy five things they need to change right now. 

This Sunday is the Academy Awards which, while increasingly tedious and irrelevant, still has a major impact on the kinds of movies that we're able to see in theaters. Let's at least hope no one tells an actress to eat a cheeseburger this time around. 

If you're tuning in to the broadcast, check out all our past coverage of Oscar-nominated films.

• Silver Linings Playbook: The film puts mental illness issues front and center, though it could use more nuance. Meanwhile, here's our illustrated ode to Jennifer Lawrence's character Tiffany.
• Flight: Denzel Washington has a solid role, but please don't let this movie win any award, except one for "most sexism." 
• Anna Karenina: This is a fresh take on a century-old narrative about gender roles, slut-shaming, and the importance of practicing train safety.  
• Zero Dark Thirty: Fingers crossed that Zero Dark Thirty wins the best picture award so that Bret Easton Ellis's head will explode. 
• The Sessions: Our Tales from the Crip blogger dug into the film's central issue of sex surrogacy.  
• Skyfall: The Academy seems to agree that the best thing about the new Bond movie is just the intro song. 
• Life of Pi: A boy and a cute tiger lead the audience through a colorful, entrancing limbo. But what's up with people of color's stories being told only through the lens of white authors? 
• Beasts of the Southern Wild: An illustrated tribute to Hushpuppy, the toughest kid in the bayou. 
• How to Survive a Plague: The documentary on AIDS activism combined old and new footage to make an inspiring flick.  

And big picture: Why don't more female directors get nominated for Oscars? It comes down to money, money, money. 

Mad about sexism at the Oscars? Sign our letter telling the Academy five things they need to change right now. 

This Sunday, we'll find out if nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis will be the youngest actress ever to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. There are some solid criticisms of the film, but just for fun, I made this illustrated tribute to Wallis and her character Hushpuppy, who lives who live Louisiana wetlands called the Bathtub in Beasts of the Southern Wild. 

“You put me in a broken plane!” wails Denzel Washington’s character, secret alcoholic pilot Whip Whitaker, in Flight, after crash-landing a malfunctioning 737. Replace “plane” with “movie,” and he’s exactly right.

The Oscars are handed out next week and Flight was inexplicably nominated for best writing after mild critical acclaim, Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by John Gatins, is not a good movie. But let’s be real: I saw Flight because I wanted to see a commercial airliner fly upside-down. I didn’t expect it to be good. I also didn’t expect it to be rife with misogyny, so when it opened with gratuitous female full-frontal nudity, I was a little confused. I had been promised harrowing turbulence! When, I wondered, would the real story begin?

Spoiler alert: A good story never begins. But the objectification soldiers on, bolstered by stale sexist tropes that Gatins seems to have all but copied and pasted from old standbys of the romance and horror genres.

In the 85-year-long history of the Academy Awards, only four women have been nominated for Best Director. That's absurd. 

This year, the 77 percent male, 94 percent white Academy made it clear that they weren’t ready to recognize a woman twice for outstanding directorial work when they snubbed Kathryn Bigelow for her work on Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. Her new film, based on true events leading up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, snagged nods for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Screenwriter, but Oscar left no love for Bigelow herself. 

Let's get this straight: While Hollywood is still male-dominated, lots of women made excellent films this year. In stark contrast to the Oscars, women filmmakers had huge success at last month's Sundance Film Festival. The lopsidedness of this year’s Oscar nominees underscores the challenges faced by women working in the world of blockbuster films. 

The problem here is not the quality of films made by women. The problem is Oscar economics.