Production Design. It's Complicated.

Film Short piece in The Guardian about Nancy Meyer's comments at a Producer's Guild of America meeting about the double standards her films have endured at the keyboard fingers of predominantly male critics, especially about production design:

"I don’t love when a journalist or critic will pick up on that aspect [of the film’s design], because they’re missing why it works. It’s never done to male directors who make gorgeous movies, or where the leads live in a gorgeous house."

Damn right. Films like Grand Budapest with their overt production design do tend to be recognised at awards more than as might be the case in a Nancy Myers film, even though they both offer similarly complex design challenges.

In the case of even It's Complicated, a designer has to decide exactly why a character lives in this house, has decorated it in this way, all the fixtures and fittings, from wall art to dishes and how they express that character.

Frequently films do have a generic interior thrown together on the quick and it strikes the wrong note undermining the suspension of disbelief. That's never the case with Nancy Meyers films and too often this is held against her.  God forbid that she'd want to control the whole image.

 Meyers is superb at what she does and the fact that she's only made one film in the past fifteen years is an utter shame.  And before you start, The Holiday is a classic. Yes, it is.