So I went down a week-long rabbit hole, reading everything I could about Nora Ephron before responding to the people who blew off my first Nora Ephron post. I posted a long piece with charts on HuffPo, and followed up with a related piece on “Tzivi’s Cinema Spotlight” (my JUF Blog page)…
No one cared (well, almost no one). It seems the 24-hour new cycle has already decreed that Nora Ephron’s film career was a great success & the truth doesn’t matter 🙁
Meanwhile, Jarrod Emerson wrote a Tribute for us which I posted on FF2. The POV of a young male screenwriter doesn’t mirror mine, of course, but it does have a value all its own 🙂
Here’s my main chart (posted in the HuffPo piece):
NOTE: Thanks to my CFCA friend Jeanne Kaplan for pointing our my error: the green tomatoes on RT are the rotten ones… oops… my bad 🙁
But my point remains the same: the more Nora Ephron’s films were the work of women directors/screenwriters (herself included), the more likely the were to be assessed as “rotten” by the mostly male critics over-represented in RT.
The exception appears to be Julie & Julia, but as I explain in my HuffPo piece, the success of Julie & Julia was primarily attributed to Meryl Streep (who got an Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category even tho she was actually playing a supporting role).
Nora Ephron got no Oscar nominations in either the Best Director category or the Best Adapted Screenplay category for her work on Julie & Julia even tho I personally think it is a much better film than the five which were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars in 2010.
