Leonardo DiCaprio has infamously been denied an Oscar for years now, and whether or not he would finally snag one last night has been the theme of popular debate and honestly much of my casual conversation for the past few weeks. Apparently, his acceptance speech was leaked, he has sworn off supermodels and has begun hanging out with Pope Francis to increase his good Oscar “juju.” However, against the grain of all Leo’s Oscar “buzz,” I just can’t seem to get myself to care.
There are bigger-picture issues that DiCaprio perpetuates — such as, DiCaprio hasn’t been in a movie directed by a woman in his entire career, in over two decades. In his quest to receive an Oscar, DiCaprio shirked working under a female directorship and instead, he has vied for roles that are “bigger” and “sexier” and much more likely to get attention worthy of an Oscar.
Lack of diversity in Hollywood has been making headlines lately, and actor David Oyelowo, who has a record streak of working with four female directors in a row, weighed in: “We can complain about inclusion, or diversity or all these words that have now become buzz phrases, but if you have the ability to do anything about it, and you don’t, you are part of the problem.”
The fact that DiCaprio is doing seemingly nothing to influence a positive change for the demographics of Hollywood is, to me, a much bigger problem than him being unable to snag an award.
Oh, he’s certainly not the only one. According to a report by Cosmopolitan Magazine through an analysis of Hollywood demographics, of the top 100 male actors in Hollywood, 20 of them have never worked with a female director. For Sean Connery, in 63 films, he has never once been directed by a woman. The next tally was of actors who had worked for just one female director. Twenty-one of the top 100 men have worked with merely one female director in their whole career — for Christopher Walken, he has only had one female director in 92 films.
The rest of the data goes on like this, with only eight of the top 100 men having worked with five or more female directors, and it is certainly discouraging to women who have aspirations in the arts.
It’s a complex issue, and it’s not completely the actors’ fault; after all, reportedly only 2 percent of the top 100 Hollywood directors are female. With this disparity, even some female actors have never worked under a female director. However, across the board, women are apparently much more likely to work with female directors.
Art has the ability to influence social change — and Hollywood especially needs to accept responsibility because of its scope, reach and influence on the entire world.
I’m not an idiot — I know there are many reasons and complexities as to why women are having trouble breaking through in Hollywood. It’s often hard to pinpoint any overt sexism — it’s much more of just an environment that men are socially able to navigate better. As someone who has considered herself a feminist since she was a kid and first discovered what gender equality was, I have recently found myself nervous to even talk about gender inequality because of the stigma around feminism that the complexity of these issues has created. I am scared on some level to talk about gender equality — as a woman, I don’t like the fact that people of certain ideologies take me to be a “sore loser” or just whiny.
But women aren’t sore losers — to be a loser you need to have been in the running in the first place. And the fact of the matter is, Hollywood conditions our reactions to certain things — this is film theory at its simplest. We are trained to laugh and to cry, and we are even trained to think certain attributes or behaviors are “sexy” and that others are unappealing. We have been trained how we should view the genders — and knee-jerk reactions to women who don’t fit into a certain mold happen to most who have been socialized through pop-culture and movies.
Hollywood manages to perform very, very poorly when it comes to gender equality — both in the way that a certain “ickiness” has been created to surround femininity and in how a woman’s career in Hollywood is tougher than a man’s. In a November 2015 Op-ed from The New York Times titled, “The Women of Hollywood speak out,” Maureen Dowd investigated the pervasive sexism that seems to keep women out of directorial roles or other positions of power in Hollywood. Dowd spoke to over 100 men and women at all levels in Hollywood to try and pinpoint the problem, and even photographed 63 female directors to, if anything, prove that they have a huge presence in Hollywood which is in large being ignored.
The reasons why women are not getting the same opportunities as their male counterparts are diverse, from being perceived that they can only direct movies about certain topics, and thus suffering a life inside a very small box, to just not being able to breakthrough into the pre-established “men’s club” that exists among the elite, Hollywood circles.
This is why I just can’t get myself to care about an extremely successful Hollywood actor, who is revered by all, is a serial-dater of supermodels and is part of a culture that makes trillions a year just to subjugate the Western world to damaging gender stereotypes. DiCaprio is part of the problem, and there are just much bigger issues than Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar.
