Like Bob Dylan famously sang: "the times, they are a-changing." We still have a long way to go, but as the Academy Awards – and other awards ceremonies as well – are now a lot more conscious about representation, we’re bound to see headlines like the one atop this page with a lot more frequency as the years pass by. With the 2022 Oscar nominations now announced, Jane Campion — director of Netflix's acclaimed western The Power of the Dog — has just made her-story as the first woman to have two Academy Award nominations for directing under her belt.
This second nomination is long overdue: Campion was last nominated at the Academy Awards in 1994, almost three decades ago. The New Zealand filmmaker brought to life a small classic called The Piano, which is also commonly known as the movie that gave an Oscar to Anna Paquin at age twelve. The period drama follows a mute Scottish woman who moves to New Zealand with her daughter in order to have an arranged marriage, and received a total of eight nominations, including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay.
Now, with The Power of the Dog, Campion is yet again nominated for the directing and writing categories, on top of scoring ten other nominations for her project, including Best Film, Best Actor for Benedict Cumberbatch, Best Actress to Kirsten Dunst, and Best Supporting Actor for Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jesse Plemons. These nominations hardly come as a surprise, as the movie has been remembered across all awards ceremonies, and was voted Best Film of the Year by the London Critics' Circle this week.
And it’s not like Campion hasn’t’ been working all these years. The director has continuously delivered stellar work in films like Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut (both starring Nicole Kidman), and Bright Star. These movies have been nominated for several awards, including the Oscars, but Campion’s work as a director remained uncelebrated by major ceremonies, which only highlights that women, Black and underrepresented artists are only brought to the table when they exceed a mountain of expectations, while white male artists are praised for doing the bare minimum.
Campion's second nomination making headlines also highlights the discrepancy between the nominations of female directors and their male peers. The late filmmaker William Wyler, for example, accumulated a total of twelve directing noms at the Oscars throughout his career, while Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and others have been remembered at least seven times each by voters. Meanwhile, you can count on your fingers how many women other than Campion have even been featured among nominees: Lina Wertmüller, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Chloé Zhao, and Emmerald Fennel. And guess how many of them are Black.
The Academy will reveal the Oscar winners on March 27.