Celebrating Women' Cinema
By Corinn Columpar

Okay, I admit it. I am an unrepentant devotee of that annual spectacle of charm, power, excess, and glamour known as the Oscars. Every year I spend the weeks between the announcement of the nominees and the telecast itself offering up my predictions to anyone who will listen or, better yet, engage me in a friendly wager; I enjoy the night of the show with a posse of like-minded pals and enough libations to keep us going for the all-night marathon as well as the Barbara Walters special beforehand; and I occupy myself for days after by celebrating or lamenting the choices made by the ever-elusive Academy. For someone like me who always chooses Premiere magazine over Newsweek when killing time at an airport gate, the Oscars are an occasion for vicarious revelry, nail-biting suspense, and unabashed stargazing. Yet even though I revel in the spectacle, I don't buy the spectacle.

The reason the Academy Awards are so fascinating and entertaining is because they are an elaborate exercise in what Hollywood does best: create fiction. The airing of the awards gives Hollywood an annual opportunity to put its best collective face forward, to define itself as a national industry and artistic community for an international audience, and, most importantly, to construct a legacy great enough to justify the billions of dollars spent and the billions of dollars earned by those few people at the top of the celluloid food chain. Knowing this, it is easier to understand why a show that is infamous for its length insists, nonetheless, upon including montage sequence after montage sequence revisiting past moments of glory in American film history. While seemingly superfluous, such filler material is actually central to the show in that it allows for Hollywood to write with a flourish its own history, its own canon, and its own list of key players.

As captured so incisively by Chris Rock last year when he, in a rare moment of unscripted banter, declared while looking out over the crowd, "It looks like the Million White Man March in here," what is most remarkable about that history, canon, and list is the extent to which they are dominated by white men. In fact, if we were to take the portrait that Hollywood presents of itself at face value, we would have to conclude that Spike Lee is the only African-American filmmaker worthy of recognition (but never reward), that Harvey and Bob Weinstein are the vanguard of independent filmmaking, and that women's contributions to great cinema are almost always limited to the fields of acting and costume design. But these things are not true; they are part of the Oscar fiction. Now this is not to say that women and people of color have historically participated in the technology, artistry, and business of light and shadows to the same extent that white men have. Indeed their relationship to the American film industry has been characterized by exclusion, discouragement, ghettoization, and/or marginalization due to a variety of factors including limited access to resources, training, and insider status. Nonetheless, the past and present of American cinema are much more diverse than one would ever expect after watching the way that Hollywood honors itself. For example, the current film industry is built upon foundations laid by a wide array of pioneers including not only the much-discussed D. W.