The power of the director: Why Jane Campion's Oscar win was overdue
LOS ANGELES — Jane Campion is now the third woman in history to win the Academy Award for director, joining a tiny pantheon of female filmmakers that will continue to grow and grow. The film academy certainly appears to have hit the accelerator: It took 81 years for Kathryn Bigelow to become the first woman to win the directing Oscar (for "The Hurt Locker"), and another 11 years for Chloé Zhao to become the second (for "Nomadland"). That it took just one more year for Campion to become the third, for "The Power of the Dog," feels like an undeniable marker of progress — a bracing sign that the movie industry is eager to make up for lost time and lost milestones.
Some might read all this and accuse me — or the academy — of prioritizing politics over artistic merit. That argument might make sense, I suppose, if you can look at the academy's decadeslong history of crowning one white male filmmaker after another, year after unexamined year, and insist with a straight face that there's nothing remotely political about that. These early but significant gestures toward parity have been a long time coming, for
