Across her career, Wertmüller won Best Director at the Locarno Film Festival (for “The Basilisk”), competed twice for the Palme d’Or at Cannes (“The Seduction of Mimi” and “Love and Anarchy”), and won Best Foreign Film honors from the National Board of Review (“Swept Away”). In 2019, the Academy awarded Wertmüller an Honorary Oscar and gave her star-studded tribute. Fellow Oscar-nominated women directors Greta Gerwig and Jane Campion presented Wertmüller the special Oscar. Gerwig hailed Wertmüller’s films as “the cinema of seduction” and called them “personal, truthful, and idiosyncratic…naughty and playful, earthbound and bawdy.”
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“How do you correct centuries of patriarchal domination?” Campion said, addressing Wertmüller. “You are a film warrior, an artist who is brave and brilliant. … ‘Seven Beauties’ is one of the best films of the twentieth century.”
Wertmüller memorably said while accepting the Oscar, “I would like to change the name Oscar to a feminine name — Anna.”
Directors such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino also honored Wertmüller during the event. “She was the first female director I knew by name,” said Tarantino, pointing out that Wertmüller was the only woman to direct a spaghetti Western (“The Belle Starr Story”).
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