Two Women Have Academy Awards for Best Director. What Now?

For the second time in its 93-year history, the Academy chucked its best statue at a lady. The world is forever changed.

Last night, at the 93rd Academy Awards, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao won the Academy Award for Best Director. This makes Zhao the first woman to win Best Director since Kathryn Bigelow took home the award for The Hurt Locker in 2010; Zhao is the first-ever woman of color to win the award.

Feminists have anticipated this day for years. (Specifically, eleven years. That’s how long it took for a second woman to win Best Director.) There is strength in numbers, and as powerful as Kathryn Bigelow might be, there were only so many things she could do alone. Now, with Zhao in the club, women who have Best Director Oscars can finally:

• Play tennis.
• Play Battleship.
• Play chess.
• Play doubles tennis with the Duplass brothers.
• Drink one large milkshake with two separate straws.
• Have a spaghetti date where they’re slurping on what appears to be two separate strands of spaghetti, but it’s actually one strand, and then — bam! — they’re kissing.
• Ride a see-saw.
• Sit next to each other on a roller coaster.
• Move a couch up a flight of stairs.
• Have a spirited debate about how best to move the couch.
• Have a messy falling-out.
• Swear vengeance on each other.
• Pursue each other through a series of glamorous international locations, pausing only for rounds of brutal hand-to-hand combat.
• Come to a draw each time.
• Sit in darkened bars, nursing whiskeys; when questioned by the bartender as to what ails them, refer to the other female Best Director as “my nemesis,” in bitter tones which nonetheless hint at a certain grudging respect.
• (They’re not in the same darkened bar when this happens. That would be weird.)
• Eventually sit in the same darkened bar.
• Stare at each other longingly but refuse to speak.
• Become aware of a greater global threat.
• Learn that this threat is posed by the Safdie brothers.
• Join forces to defeat the Safdie brothers.
• Ding-dong ditch both Russo brothers on the way home.
• Reconcile their differences.
• Point out that there are more than two female directors in the universe.
• Point out that a system which has rewarded only two women in its nine-decade history is pretty fucked up.
• Point out that, previous to today, there were fewer women with Best Director Oscars than there were Coen brothers with Best Director Oscars.
• Acknowledge that, even now, the ratio of Coen brothers to women of color is 2–1.
• Enthusiastically advocate for the many amazing female directors working today, each of whom brings her own unique vision to the table, such that she can never be boiled down to a label as reductive as “female director.”
• Let both Wachowski sisters hold their Oscars.