Accompanying Suffragette, the new film about the early days of the women's rights movement in Great Britain, to Telluride, Meryl Streep used the occasion to ask a provocative question and to give Hollywood a heads-up that The New York Times' Maureen Dowd is currently working on an exposé about gender equality in the film industry.

Speaking during a Saturday morning Q&A moderated by KPCC's John Horn, Streep, who appears in the film as British feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, asked, "They [young female filmmakers today] do exist, they graduate [from top film schools], they're good — and then they don't get hired. Why?" She added, "Maureen Dowd is writing a great big exposé about this question in The New York Times Magazine, coming up soon."

While most would certainly support the film's message and the idea of gender equality, it is less certain that the Academy, which has had its own struggles with gender inequality, will throw its arms around the film. Strong films about social movements are hard to portray well on screen, since most films revolve around an individual, and yet few individuals actually have a hand in every important facet of a movement, leading filmmakers to resort to cliche or overstatement. My suspicion is that Academy members will receive Suffragette like other recent British period piece social dramas, such as 2010's Made in Dagenham and 2014's Pride: with applause for having been made, but no major awards recognition (with the possible exception of some support for Mulligan).