Women directors are barred from being nominated for Golden Globes in 2023
The move follows two consecutive years of multiple nominations — and wins — for female filmmakers in the category.
There will be no possibility for a woman to accept a directing award for a motion picture at the Beverly Hilton when the Golden Globes return on January 10 to telecast live on NBC.
For the first time since the 2020 ceremony, no woman was nominated for best director. Despite a buzzy awards season for several female directors, like Gina Prince-Bythewood of The Woman King and Sarah Polley of Women Talking, Other filmmakers in the running are Till’s Chinonye Chukwu and She Said’s Maria Schrader.
Polley, who also directed and scripted the film, was nominated for best screenplay, and Women Talking’s composer Hildur Gunadóttir was nominated for best original score. The Woman King garnered a leading actress nomination for Viola Davis, while She Said landed a supporting actress nom for Carey Mulligan. Till was completely shut out.
None of the live-action best picture nominees — in either the drama or musical/comedy categories — were helmed by women either. (Filmmaker Domee Shi, however, garnered a best-animated feature nomination for Disney’s Turning Red.)
The 2023 directing nominees are also predominantly white, with Kwan becoming only the fifth director of Asian descent to be nominated in the category and only the third potential Asian winner, behind Ang Lee and Chloé Zhao.
Following two years of progress in honoring and awarding female directors, this year’s nominations are the first time women have been completely excluded from the category. Jane Campion, who was nominated for Power of the Dog alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal from The Lost Daughter, won the Golden Globe in 2022. In 2021, three women were nominated: Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman, Regina King for One Night in Miami… and the category’s winner, Nomadland‘s Zhao.
That same year also marked historic nominations and wins, with Zhao becoming the first Asian woman to win in the directing category, while King became only the second Black woman to be nominated in the honor’s history, following Ava DuVernay’s 2014 nomination for Selma.
Aside from Kwan’s record nomination for Asian filmmakers, the 2023 best director nominations reflect a return to form for the academy. The Globes have only nominated a few women in its 80-year history, including Campion, Zhao, King, Fennell, DuVernay, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Barbra Streisand. Streisand, Zhao, and Campion are the only female winners.
The 2023 Oscars will appear live on NBC and Peacock on Tuesday, Jan. 10, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT, after a year off the air due to a scandal involving the Globes’ parent organization, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.