Oscars 2019: Independent's own all-female nominees for Academy awards

In light of the Academy's failure to recognise what a stellar year 2018 was for female filmmaking, Harriet Hall presents an alternative list of nominees

Clockwise from top right: The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Madeline’s Madeline and Leave No Trace

Hollywood saw a reckoning in 2018. Women wore black, stood up and spoke out, calling time's up on misogynistic slights and oversights.

Meanwhile, female-led movies proved they weren’t box-office poison, new and exciting women arrived on the scene, and the BFI London Film Festival screened the highest number of female-directed films in its history.

Strangely, none of this reached the Academy, whose establishment attitude prevailed. As sure as night follows day, this year’s Oscar nominations snubbed female directors, screenwriters and producers – just as it has for most of its 90-year history.

The Oscars aren’t alone. This year, all the major award shows have miraculously overlooked female contribution (the Globes, the Baftas and the Critic’s Choice Awards) despite a roster of critically acclaimed, box-office smashing, career-defining movies offered up by women across the board. But with not a single woman nominated for the two top gongs – Best Director and Best Picture – and with scant offerings elsewhere, the Oscars is the most egregious offender.

So, in an effort to balance the books, we’ve decided to announce our own all-female Academy Award winners across the big five categories.

Best Director

Women nominated by the Academy: 0 / 5

The Independent’s nominees:

Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Chloe Zhao, The Rider

Susanne Bier, Bird Box

Debra Granik, Leave No Trace

The Independent’s Academy Award goes to: Lynne Ramsay, You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsay is a glaring omission from the best director race, for Palme d’Or nominated You Were Never Really Here. Described as an “avant-garde Taken” by The Independent, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as a PTSD- suffering Gulf war veteran and former FBI agent, hired to rescue kidnapped girls from sex trafficking by any means necessary.

Ramsay’s inimitable vision is as remarkable as it is disquieting, shaking off any female director preconceptions. The We Need to Talk About Kevin director combines artfully off-kilter camerawork with rhythmic editing and a hauntingly abrasive score – courtesy of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood – to give a female slant to a violent, macho world.

Phoenix walked away with the best actor award at Cannes in 2017, with Ramsay winning best screenplay, and it’s easy to see why. There are similarities between Phoenix’s loner assassin and Robert De Niro’s antihero in Taxi Driver, and Ramsay’s bold adaptation of Jonathan Ames’s 2013 short story is as emotionally disturbed as Scorsese’s 1976 classic.

Since only one woman has ever walked away with Best Director – Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2008 – a win for Ramsay would have been an historical Oscars moment. Sadly, that is not to be.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Women nominated by the Academy: 1 / 12

The Independent’s nominees:

Desiree Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Sofia Alvarez, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Debra Granik, Leave No Trace

The Independent’s Academy Award goes to: Nicole Holofcener, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

'Can You Ever Forgive Me' (AP)

The perfect film for an era of fake news, Can You Ever Forgive Me? sees Melissa McCarthy play washed-up biographer Lee Israel, who turns to writing fictitious celebrity letters – at first to pay the bills, and later, we suspect, for the thrill of it.

Adapted by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty from Israel’s 2008 autobiography Memoirs of a Literary Forger, this melancholic yet humorous screenplay has actually been nominated in this category. McCarthy and Richard E Grant have each picked up their own Oscar nominations as well – all the more reason for Holofcener (the only woman nominated this year) to walk away with some well-deserved industry recognition, too.

The film is directed by The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Marielle Heller (who was also disregarded for the best director accolade) and is a compassionate portrait of a woman whose life is spiralling away from her. Rude and irascible, Israel is an unlikeable protagonist on paper – but thanks to Holofcener, Heller and McCarthy, we find ourselves rooting for her anyway.

The Independent’s chief film critic, Geoffrey Macnab, gave Can You Ever Forgive Me? a five-star review, describing the screenplay as “well-structured, witty and poignant”.

“It’s weird,” Holofcener told Vogue. “There are so many women who have done incredible work this year, but they’ve been totally ignored by the awards. In many ways, I feel so fortunate to be working, but there are times when I look around and realise that we still have so far to go.” Here’s hoping she doesn’t have to turn to forgery to get noticed by the Academy.

Best Picture

Women nominated by the Academy (films with female directors): 0 / 8

The Independent’s nominees:

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Madeline’s Madeline

Private Life

The Rider

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

On the Basis of Sex

The Independent’s Academy Award goes to: Leave No Trace

Working from Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, Debra Granik followed up 2010's Winter’s Bone (2010) – which put Jennifer Lawrence on the map – with Leave No Trace, a profound and deeply affecting meditation on trauma and isolation, with two flat-out superb performances at its core.

It’s the story of Iraq veteran Will (Ben Foster), and his 13-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), who live off-grid in the wilds of Portland, Oregon in a complete rejection of modern society. They sleep in tents and live off the land, until one day a life-altering mistake blows their cover and sees them interrogated by social services. Introduced to a different world, Tom begins to questions whether the life her father built for her is one she actually wants.

Described by The Independent as a “subtle and enigmatic drama”, whose brilliance “is in its understatement”, Leave No Trace boasts a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. And if you need more persuasion, Barack Obama selected it as one of his favourite films of last year. If that’s not Oscar material, we don’t know what is, but sadly, it still didn’t get a look in.

*Disclaimer: the Academy Award for Best Picture actually goes to a film's producers, rather than the director. This year there are four women out of a total number of 25 producers nominated. They are Ceci Dempsey (The Favourite), Gabriela Rodriguez (Roma), Lynette Howell Taylor (A Star is Born) and Dede Gardner (Vice).

Best Cinematography

Women nominated by the Academy: 0 / 5

The Independent’s nominees:

Reed Morano, I Think We’re Alone Now

Ashley Connor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

The Independent’s Academy Award goes to: Madeline’s Madeline

'Madeline's Madeline' (Pictures by Reuters/Andrew Kelly)

No film has quite tapped into the mental anguish that goes into performance art quite like Black Swan did. That was, until Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, a film so powerful that it almost sweeps you into the teenage protagonist’s tortured soul. In it, theatre company director Evangeline (Molly Parker) takes on a young star and in so doing, blurs the lines between creativity and manipulation.

This is an avant-garde film that knowingly sends up experimental theatre pretension, and newcomer Helena Howard’s visceral depiction of Madeline’s adolescent angst is career-defining.

Cinematographer Ashley Connor uses visual distortion to reflect Madeline’s unspecified mental torment, combining close-ups, lens flares and blow outs to create a colourful attack of visuals.

Three years in the making, this is no normal coming-of-age film. The power of this picture is held in its cinematography, and it’s criminal that it didn’t get a look in here. It’s unsurprising, though, given that only one woman has ever been nominated in the history of this category (Rachel Morrison, Mudbound).

Best Original Screenplay

Women nominated by the Academy: 1 / 8

The Independent’s nominees:

Tamara Jenkins, Private Life

Jennifer Fox, The Tale

Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, The Favourite

The Independent’s Academy Award goes to: The Rider

Met with raucous praise at Cannes, where it was awarded the Art Cinema prize, Chloe Zhao’s beautifully naunced rodeo film The Rider has opened the door to more mainstream projects: the Chinese filmmaker will direct Marvel’s The Eternals for her next picture.

Zhao was inspired to write The Rider after meeting real-life rodeo rider Brady Jandreau, who stars as the film’s broken protagonist Brady Blackburn. After a brutal accident, Brady is left unable to ride again, and is forced to re-examine his life’s purpose.

A sensitive and sombre portrait of masculinity, The Rider is a western for the Trump era. “The Rider portrays its troubled main character with extraordinary tenderness and insight,” says Macnab. This film didn’t get a single Oscar nomination.