Sure, in any individual contest, you can evaluate who is better, individual A or individual B. But when you get 400 individuals from one category to 5 individuals from another, you have to conclude that either the individuals in one category are much much better at this contest than the individuals in the other category, or there is some systemic issue that is preventing the second category from winning.
There are many possible systemic issues. What’s brilliant about Portman’s approach is that we now have a list. Which of these are the best directed films of 2019:
The Farewell
Joker
Honey Boy
Hustlers
The Irishman
Little Women
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Queen & Slim
I’m not qualified to answer that question. But unless we see a clear break between the ones that happen to be directed by individual men and those that happen to be directed by individual women, Portman has eliminated the argument that the problem is with numbers of women directors, or quality of their directing. And that leaves, as the most likely issue, the quality of the nominations.
And that’s why there’s the reputation of the awards being an “Old Boys Club showing of the exact same kinds of movies every time.”
The lack of female nominees is a symptom. The solution isn’t a quota of some percent of women nominated per year, but rather a recognition that the Academy has created a feedback loop, and a commitment to redressing the underlying issues.
From a different context, in the early years of Google Doodles, something like 80+% of the ones that featured a person featured a man, and a similar percentage were of white people. Now, it is possible that just about every day that was the anniversary of an important women or non-white person, there was an even more important anniversary that happened to be of a white man. Or, as Google realized, maybe the problem was the unexamined biases of the people making the decisions about what was important.
