It’s been roughly a week since actress Sigourney Weaver blamed his lack of breasts as the reason James Cameron lost out to Kathryn Bigelow in the battle for the Best Director Oscar. Yet, there’s been no media feeding frenzy as a result, even though Weaver essentially said Bigelow didn’t really deserve her Oscar – it was simply a matter of gender politics at work.
Shouldn’t women’s groups be outraged by such a remark? Or did they see a kernel of truth in what Weaver said? The National Organization for Women has nothing about the incident on its web site.
So Big Hollywood reached out to several women connected to the film industry to get their thoughts on Weaver’s accusations.
Ally Acker with Reel Women Media says politics play a factor in why certain people win that golden statuette: “When Mo’Nique said at the Oscars, ‘I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics,’ she must have been delusional,” Acker says. “Her performance was good, but her award was all about politics.”
“After 82 years, the Academy had to award a woman or there would have been a revolt,” she said about the Best Director Oscar. “Why not award a woman who shoots guy stuff as well, or better than the guys?”
Women & Hollywood blogger Melissa Silverstein says via her site that Weaver threw Bigelow “under the bus in a big way.” She continued, “I know that [Weaver] loves Cameron. He gave her some of her greatest parts. But really, do you have to diss a fellow hard working director? And I find it interesting to have a very high profile woman diss another high profile woman. Well, we all love the catfight. Ugh.”
Weaver’s comments tarnish Bigelow’s Oscar in a way that wouldn’t have happened with other nominees, she says. “Would anyone be talking about this if [Quentin] Tarantino or one of the other guys had won over Cameron?” she asks.
Jane Fleming, President of Women In Film, took a more moderate tone in her statement regarding the incident:
Women In Film is thrilled for Kathryn Bigelow and applauds her historic win. As an organization, we don’t need to spend time judging the opinions of others as much as we need to continue on our mission to foster, train and financially support female filmmakers so that we can reach a moment in history when there are enough women represented in the creative arts that their work will be judged simply on its own merit, not on the gender of the person who created it.
The bigger question remains unanswered: Why didn’t more women in Hollywood speak out on their own to defend Bigelow?
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