Last year began with the Women’s March and closed with scores of female accusers coming forward and ending the careers of the powerful men who had harassed and assaulted them. If movies had failed to present female characters who matched the dynamic, fearless women who dominated the news throughout 2017, Hollywood might have needed to cancel awards season as an act of cultural penance.

Thank goodness, then, that some of the best Oscar-nominated films of this season overflowed with fascinating, indelible women (despite the fact that many of the movies had been written by men, an ironic imbalance that will likely take several more years of activism to fully rectify). There were triumphant feminist heroines, complex romantic leads, and one all-time-great villain. The hoary term “strong female character” has never seemed less useful; these women were powerful and weak, determined and indecisive, endearing and irritating—often all at once.

Take the two main female characters in Mudbound, which writer-director Dee Rees adapted from a screenplay by Virgil Williams (based on Hillary Jordan’s book) to be a story of two families, one white and one black, scraping by on a Mississippi farm. Laura and Florence, played by Carey Mulligan and Mary J. Blige, respectively, strike up an uneasy working relationship when Florence begins caring for Laura’s children. “Each believes the other has power over her, and it’s true in a way,” Rees said. “For Laura, she feels that Florence has the power because [she] has the power to heal. Even though Florence doesn’t have a choice of participating in that situation, she still has the power of her know-how. And then Laura has the power of her whiteness. To me that was the core of the relationship, everything was about the bartering of power.”

In one of the film’s many striking scenes, Laura seeks comfort from Florence after having a miscarriage; Florence lets Laura hug her but is visibly emotionally removed. “Florence is very sober about the fact that, just because they’re having a moment, it doesn’t mean that Laura is ever going to think of her truly as an equal,” Rees said. Particularly in this period in the Jim Crow South, Rees noted, “there’s danger in over-familiarity, and that’s how you die, when you become too close or assume too much.”

Rees wove into the script stories about her own grandparents, including one specific superstition that comes to life in the film when Florence’s oldest son is deployed to Europe to fight in World War II. “In the book, Florence is written as this overly superstitious person, and I wanted to trim that back and give her something that felt honest to me,” Rees said. “My paternal grandmother thought it was bad luck to watch people leave, and that’s why I gave Florence that.”

There is no screenwriter this year closer to her central character than Emily V. Gordon, who, with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani, wrote the romantic comedy The Big Sick, based on their real love story and the medical crisis that left Emily in a coma. The couple had the challenge of turning their personal history into a three-act comedy, without reducing either character to a familiar rom-com trope. “Especially with female characters, it’s easy to be, like, she’s sassy or very smart, but people are kind of everything all at once,” Nanjiani said. “We really wanted to do that with Emily. Especially because she disappears for half the movie, she has to feel real enough and contradictory enough and messy enough that you feel her presence even though she’s not there.”

The revealing introduction to Emily’s character, though, required Nanjiani and Gordon to re-write their real history. “In the scene when he writes her name in Urdu on the napkin, and she calls him out on it being a move, in real life I fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Gordon admitted. “We could have kept it that way, but that for me felt like a different movie, not a movie where people are wanting to challenge each other. And that is how we were in reality, but in that moment in reality I fell for it.”