Female Film Critics 24/375
This year’s best picture Academy Award winner CODA, 2021 best picture Oscar winner Nomadland and fellow Academy Award winners The Power of the Dog, Encanto, Cruella and West Side Story have met the criteria to receive the ReFrame Stamp.
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At the 2021 Academy Awards ceremonies, women earned a record 17 trophies, the most in Oscar history. Considering the ceremony awarded 30 male winners, that means women received 36% of the statuettes awarded in the 23 competitive categories. Compare that to 2020, when a third of the 39 winners were women, and 2019, when 15 of the 54 winners were women, which is 27.8%.
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Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao and Promising Young Woman‘s Emerald Fennell are now part of Academy Awards history. For the first time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated two women in the directing category, with Zhao and Fennell picking up nods in the coveted category.
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Knowing the fascinating backstory of Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland gives audiences additional appreciation of this film’s unique style and universal appeal. Sandie Angulo Chen get the inside scoop from two of the film’s backstory principals, Jessica Bruder who wrote the book behind the adapted script and Bob Wells, a Nomad clan leader who added his own unique voice to the screenplay. Both were mentioned by Chloe Zhao in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. Sandie Angulo Chen chats with Bruder and Wells for their take on Nomadland.
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Anyone who saw director Chloé Zhao’s impressive film, The Rider, expects her imprint to embellish, her choices to be signatory. Zhao’s screenplay, although based on Jessica Bruder’s eye-opening exposé about the lives of older, rootless workers, skews Bruder’s emphasis to Zhao’s. Like The Rider, Nomadland amalgamates documentary with narrative forms of film.
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In this migrant drama, Chloe Zhao paints a subtle portrait of a resilient woman determined to survive despite devastating loss. Widowed, 61 year-old Fern (Frances McDormand) lost everything in the 2008 financial collapse, including her home and her job in now-deserted Empire, Nevada. So she sets out alone across the American West in her ramshackle Ford Econoline van, joining a caravan of modern-day nomads, a rag-tag community, squatting in RV parks.
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The Independent Filmmaker Project has announced the nominees for the 30th Annual IFP Gotham Awards, and this is the first time that all five nominated films in the best feature category are from women directors: The Assistant from Kitty Green, First Cow from Kelly Reichardt, Never Rarely Sometimes Always from Eliza Hittman, Nomadland from Chloé Zhao and Relic from Natalie Erika James.
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The film examines the phenomenon of travelers going across the country in search of work, through the lens of a widow named Fern (McDormand), who lives in her van. Other than co-star David Strathairn, who plays a fellow nomad, the secondary characters are played by real people on the nomad community. McDormand, Zhao, and crew members lived out of vans during production. The result is a film that is beautiful and sad and unique. It will blow you away.
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Chloé Zhao’s acclaimed drama Nomadland, starring Oscar winner Frances McDormand, made its NY premiere on September 26 as the Centerpiece film at the 58th New York Film Festival, Earlier this month, the film was lauded with the Golden Lion this year at the 77th Venice International Film Festival and awarded the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival. It is the first film to hold both honors.
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Who but Frances McDormand could take on such mundane tasks as making peanut butter sandwiches, cleaning toilets and packing merchandise into Amazon boxes and transform such moments into a riveting cinematic experience? The two-time Oscar-winning best-actress for 1996’s Fargo and 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is at the top of her game in filmmaker Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland.
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