Earlier tonight I was watching the Oscars show. It came time to announce the winner in the Best Director category. Now I usually watch the show every year, but I am certainly not a historian, I couldn’t even tell you who won last year, and already forgotten most of the winners this time around. In the lead up to announcing the winner for the best director, it was mentioned there was a chance we could have either the first woman or African American winner for best director.
The way that was stated lead me to believe this might have actually been the first time that either a woman or African American had ever been nominated. Again I don’t know Oscar history that well, so I might be wrong on that, just was my impression. As it turned out Kathryn Bigelow won as best director for The Hurt Locker, so now indeed we do have the first woman to win best director, congratulations to her 
It got me to thinking, yeah it happens every so often for me. Here it is 2010 and we are just now seeing the first woman to win best director, and we still haven’t had an African American or either gender win. And I do remember enough about Oscar history to know that it was just a couple of years ago that Densel Washington was the first African American man to win the best actor award. And this is Hollywood we’re talking about, which certainly has a reputation as being a fairly liberal institution.
It’s all just another stark reminder to me about how much inequality exists in the world today, and especially within the US, and just how difficult it is to overcome. I guess on some level progress is made, but it sure seems slow to me.