Back in August of 2010, I started watching all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture in order and blogging about them (you can find that blog here). Though I definitely liked some of them much better than others, overall it was a very fun project and I'm glad I did it. But one thing I noticed is that the vast majority of Best Picture Winners are movies about men. Now, it would be one thing if the older movies were all about men and there were more and more movies about women winning recently, but that's not how it's happened. Actually, most of the winners that are about women are older movies. For instance, three of the four winners from 1939-1942 have female protagonists. The most recent winner about a woman is Million Dollar Baby, from 2004, and even with that movie an argument could be made for calling Clint Eastwood's character the protagonist. The next year's winner, Crash, had an ensemble cast featuring both males and females, but each of the next nine winners has a decidedly male protagonist. Of course, this isn't really that surprising, considering that the majority of Academy voters are men, and considering that the only woman to ever win Best Director did so for a film about men, not to mention the fact that most movies that are made at all are about men. But that doesn't make it any less disappointing. So after watching all those films about men I wanted to watch all the Best Actress winning performances because I figure that in order to win Best Actress in a Leading Role, a movie must have a leading role for an actress. It will be interesting to see how many of these roles are indeed protagonists and how many of them are more like the love interest of the male protagonist.
Anyway, I'm going to do this kind of the same way I did the Best Picture Winners: watching them all in order, regardless of whether I've seen them before or not, and then posting my thoughts on this blog. I'll be focusing on the actresses' performances rather than the movies as a whole, so I'll have something different to say about those that also won Best Picture, but I might add other thoughts about the movies if I feel like it. My opinions will definitely be biased by how familiar I am with the actresses' other work, and I'm certainly no acting expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I don't know how long this is going to take; it took me almost a year to get caught up with the Best Picture Winners, and there were fewer of them. Also I've noticed that it's much harder to track down some of these movies than it was to track down any of the Best Picture Winners, which could be more sexism, but also could be because Best Picture is just generally considered to be a higher honor than any acting Oscar, so Best Picture Winners are in higher demand. Also there are three films for the first year. So it will get done when it gets done. Thanks for reading!
