‘Barbie’ ruled the Box Office, but 2023 has been tough for women in Hollywood

When Greta Gerwig didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for best director for “Barbie” last month, despite the film’s best picture nod and its status as a global box office phenomenon, the news has drawn attention to gender diversity within the Academy of Motion Picture Doctor revived. and membership in Sciences.

The director branch, which chooses the five nominees for that Oscar category, consists of 25 percent women. In total, 34 percent of the academy’s more than 10,000 members are women.

“The academy, like our industry, must reflect the world we live in,” said David Heyman, producer of “Barbie.” “The fact that this is not the case is just wrong.”

In 2016, in response to the #OscarsSoWhite backlash after two consecutive years of all-white acting nominations, the academy announced its A2020 initiative, aimed at doubling the number of women and people of color among its members within five years. In June 2020, it said it had achieved these goals.

Since then, however, the percentage of women in the academy has grown by one point to 34 percent. (Academy members can choose not to identify as male or female. Other choices include “age,” “non-binary,” “other,” “prefer to describe,” and “prefer not to say.”) The percentage of people of color has fallen one point, to 18 percent.

The academy is an invitation-only nonprofit organization that represents acceptance into the highest echelon of the film industry. Although membership requirements vary for each of the 18 branches, people must be sponsored by two members of the branch they wish to join. Oscar nominees are automatically eligible for membership.

In an effort to maintain its size of approximately 10,000 members, the academy has reduced the number of people it admits annually in recent years, from 928 in 2018 to an average of 397 per year since 2020.

In an interview, Meredith Shea, the academy’s chief membership, impact and industry officer, said she was unhappy with the current makeup of the membership, but added that each department’s executive committee is “still looking at increasing representation across the whole line. ”

“I am taking a fresh look at what we need to do and what steps need to be taken,” Ms. Shea said. “There are 18 different verticals that reflect different industries. So it’s looking at what you need to do in terms of visual effects: do we create a pipeline program there? What happens in costume and makeup is not what happens in some of our other disciplines.

“Nothing slows down, nothing stops,” she added. “We just have to make sure we do this well and holistically, because it will never be one size fits all.”

The management branch is led by two women, Ava DuVernay and Susanne Bier. Only eight women have ever been nominated for best director, including Jane Campion twice and this year Justine Triet. Ms. Gerwig is one of them and was recognized for “Lady Bird” in 2017. Three women won the award: Ms. Campion, Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao. Two women have only been nominated once in the same year: Ms. Zhao and Emerald Fennell in 2021.

The academy noted that for the first time, three films nominated for best picture this year were directed by women: “Barbie,” Ms. Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Past Lives,” directed by Celine Song. And in each of the past five years, at least one best picture nominee has been directed by a woman.

“Barbie” received a total of eight nominations, including a nod to Ms. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach in the best adapted screenplay category.

Some industries – makeup and hair, casting directors and costume designers – are dominated by women. The three with the fewest women are sound (15 percent), visual effects (12 percent) and cinematographers (11 percent).

Still, some advocates for better opportunities for women in the entertainment industry say that while they would like to see better gender representation in the academy, it operates in a broader ecosystem.

“We want the academy to achieve parity, but the academy reflects the industry,” said Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of Women in Film, a nonprofit organization.

In a report Released last month, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the number of women and women of color in lead or co-lead roles in the top 100 box office films in 2023 was the lowest since 2014.

And despite the $1.4 billion that “Barbie” took in at the global box office, only 16 percent of the directors of the 250 top-grossing films for 2023 were women, according to a study by Martha M. Lauzen, its founder and executive director . from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The USC study found that 30 of the 100 top-grossing films starred or co-starred women — “a catastrophic step backward for women and girls,” said a co-author of the study, Stacy L. Smith. In 2022, 44 women played leading or co-leading roles.

Ms. Schaffer pointed to these statistics as evidence that the academy was in some ways “over-indexing” compared to gender representation in the industry as a whole. For example, the academy’s acting department is made up of 47 percent women.

What Ms. Schaffer would like is gender equality in all industries, especially those where women are rarely nominated, such as cinematography and visual effects.

“The academy and industry need to make more of an effort to accelerate these numbers,” she said. “We cannot wait another hundred years to reach even 30 percent of cinematographers. We are moving up so slowly that it will take like 2070 before we get anywhere close to parity.”