"Mad Max: Fury Road" roared into the Oscars with a near-sweep of the night's biggest technical categories.
Mark Mangini and David White, winners for Best Sound Editing. Photo by Mark Ralston/Getty Images.
It was a huge win for one of the year's most innovative, critically-acclaimed, and all-around badass movies.
"Fury Road" deserves all the awards ever for putting women front and center on camera.
GIF from "Mad Max: Fury Road."
But the best part of all the acceptance speeches? Seeing how many amazing women worked on it behind the camera.
Like Jenny Beavan, who won for Best Costume Design.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
Lisa Thompson, who (co-)won for Best Production Design.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
Elka Wardega and Lesley Vanderwalt, who (co-)won for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
And Margaret Sixel, who won for best editing.
Photo by Mark Ralston/Getty Images.
Sixel is married to "Fury Road" director George Miller, and the story of how she got the job is ... kind of amazing:
"Margaret Sixel initially turned her husband down, asking, 'Why do you want me to do an action film?'" Miller told the Huffington Post back in May.
"'Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie," he replied.
That's how a truly great and innovative movie gets made — by hiring the people who don't ordinarily get asked.
Hollywood is generally pretty terrible at placing women in prominent behind-the-scenes roles. As a result, movies are being made by pretty much the same people who have always made them.
It might explain why there are so many bad movies.
"Fury Road" did the opposite — and got amazing results for it. Why do its action sequences pop? A woman, one who had never worked on an action movie before, edited them. Why does the script do so right by its female characters? Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," consulted on the script.
Seeing all those women up there on the Oscars stage sends a powerful message to young, aspiring filmmakers that creativity knows no gender, and neither does rising to the top of your craft.
A movie like "Fury Road" could only have been made by men and women working together, merging their diverse experiences to create something new, innovative, and thrilling.
GIF by "Mad Max: Fury Road."
Enjoy the after-party, ladies and dudes. You earned it.
Men try to read the most disturbing comments women get online back to them.
If you wouldn't say it to their faces, don't type it.
This isn’t comfortable to talk about.
Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault and violence.
in 2016, a video by Just Not Sports took two prominent female sportswriters and had regular guys* read the awful abuse they receive online aloud.
Sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro sat by as men read some of the most vile tweets they receive on a daily basis. See how long you can last watching it.
*(Note: The men reading them did not write these comments; they're just being helpful volunteers to prove a point.)
It starts out kind of jokey but eventually devolves into messages like this:
Awful.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
These types of messages come in response to one thing: The women were doing their jobs.
Those wishes that DiCaro would die by hockey stick and get raped? Those were the result of her simply reporting on the National Hockey League's most disturbing ordeal: the Patrick Kane rape case, in which one of the league's top players was accused of rape.
DiCaro wasn't writing opinion pieces. She was simply reporting things like what the police said, statements from lawyers, and just general everyday work reporters do. In response, she received a deluge of death threats. Her male colleagues didn't receive nearly the same amount of abuse.
It got to the point where she and her employer thought it best for her to stay home for a day or two for her own physical safety.
The men in the video seemed absolutely shocked that real live human beings would attack someone simply for doing their job.
Not saying it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Most found themselves speechless or, at very least, struggling to read the words being presented.
It evoked shame and sympathy.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Think this is all just anecdotal? There's evidence to the contrary.
The Guardian did a study to find out how bad this problem really is. They combed through more than 70 million comments that have been posted on their site since 2006 and counted the number of comments that violated their comment policy and were blocked.
The stats were staggering.
From their comprehensive and disturbing article:
If you can’t say it to their face... don’t type it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
So, what can people do about this kind of harassment once they know it exists?
There are no easy answers. But the more people who know this behavior exists, the more people there will be to tell others it's not OK to talk to anyone like that.
Watch the whole video below:
.This article originally appeared nine years ago.