Do the Golden Globes Have a Glass Ceiling?

The Golden Globe Awards are this Sunday, and I’m excited, especially for one nominee. The buzz is all over director Kathryn Bigelow and ‘The Hurt Locker,’ an action film about a bomb-defusing squad in Baghdad.

Last summer, Bigelow talked to Kurt about her transition from young painter to action filmmaker(‘Point Break,’ ‘Strange Days’):

But Bigelow’s nomination is particularly shocking to me: she is only the fourth woman to be nominated for Best Director in the 67-year history of the award.

‘Yentl‘ garnered Barbra Streisand the first Best Director nomination for a woman at the 1984 awards. And she won. She broke the barrier, and the floodgates were supposed to be opened for female creative minds to rush through. But 26 years later, she is still the only woman to have won the award. That flood of female filmmakers in Hollywood is still just a trickle. New York Times film critic, Manohla Dargis recently wrote about the disappointing trends in women film directors in Hollywood. And she gave a surprisingly candid (to put it mildly) follow-up interview with Jezebel.

(The Academy Awards fare even worse on the gender issue. In its 81-years of the Oscars, not only has no woman ever won a golden statue for Directing — only three of the 400 nominations were female.)

So even if Bigelow takes home a Golden Globe this weekend, will anything change? Or in another twenty years, will articles be written applauding the third woman to win?

– Jess Jiang