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 women in general and for the 67-year-old Campion in particular, who has been happily making history for decades even if this particular honor has eluded her until now.
Campion received her first directing Oscar nomination for her rapturously romantic 1993 drama, "The Piano," which had already made her the first woman to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn't a solo triumph (she shared the Palme with the Chinese director Chen Kaige for "Farewell My Concubine"), but it was nonetheless a striking vindication for the New Zealand-born Campion after the boos she'd received at Cannes for her 1989 debut feature, "Sweetie." Along with "An Angel at My Table," her 1990 miniseries based on the life of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, "Sweetie" and "The Piano" established Campion as a teller of uncommonly bold, aesthetically uncompromising stories about women, specifically women's bodies and women's desires, often in revolt against a world set decisively against them.
