Historically, however, the Academy Awards have not nominated many women for Best Director. In fact, only five have currently been nominated in the whole 90-year history of the awards, and only one has won.
All the women nominated for Best Director at the Oscars
1976 - Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties
It took 48 years for the Academy to nominate its first female director. Though women have been directing since at least 1896 (when the French filmmaker Alice Guy started making films) Hollywood did not let many women make movies. In the so-called ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ of the 1930s to 1950s, only two women (Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino) were able to have significant directing careers.
Fittingly, then, it was not an American director who would become the first female Best Director nominee. Instead, that honor went to the Italian Lina Wertmüller for her film Seven Beauties, the story of a man sent to a German camp who deserts the army during World War II.
Though she would lose out on the night to John G. Avildsen for Rocky, in 2019 (at the age of 90) she was awarded an Honorary Award from the Academy for her work. This made her the second female director to attain such an award after France’s Agnès Varda.
1993 - Jane Campion for The Piano
The next female director nominated would come 17 years later. Again, it would not be an American director nominated but the New Zealand-born Jane Campion. Her film The Piano, starring Holly Hunter as a 19th Century mute Scottish woman who travels to New Zealand, won three Oscars and was nominated for eight. Hunter won for Best Actress, Anna Paquin for Supporting Actress, while Campion herself took home Best Screenplay. The film also won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, the only movie by a female director to do so.
However, the Academy gave the award that year to Steven Spielberg for Schindler’s List, which also won Best Picture later in the night.
2003 - Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation
A decade later, the first American woman director was nominated, 75 years into Oscars history, when Sofia Coppola got a nod for her Lost in Translation, which sees Scarlet Johansson’s young woman bond with Bill Murray’s aging actor in Tokyo.
Coppola is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, himself an Oscar-winning director (for The Godfather Part II) and three-time nominee (The Godfather, The Godfather Part III and Apocalypse Now). However, Sofia Coppola was not able to match her father’s Oscar, which went that year to Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King—which won all 11 awards for which it was nominated. Like Campion before her, however, Coppola did win Best Screenplay.
2009 - Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker
The first woman won Best Director, meanwhile, 81 years into Oscars history, as Kathryn Bigelow surprised many by defeating Avatar, directed by her ex-husband James Cameron, to both Best Picture and Best Director.
“It’s the moment of a lifetime,” the director said as she accepted her award, beating Cameron, Lee Daniels (for Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) and Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) in the process.
2017 - Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird
Despite female filmmakers breaking the Oscars glass ceiling in 2009, only one woman has been nominated since. In 2017, Greta Gerwig became the first woman to be nominated in the category for her debut film, Lady Bird, a coming-of-age story about a creative young woman (played by Saoirse Ronan) coming of age in Sacramento, California.
Nominated for five Oscars, including a Best Original Screenplay nod for Gerwig, it did not win anything on the night, with Guillermo Del Toro winning Best Director for his work on the Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water.
Gerwig then looked set to become the first woman nominated in the category twice, but her lack of nomination for Little Women became one of the notable snubs of the 2020 ceremony.
2020 - Chloe Zhao for Nomadland
After becoming the second-ever woman to win Best Director at the Golden Globes (after Barbra Streisand), Chloe Zhao is also the favorite for this year’s Oscars, where she is the first woman of color to be nominated in the category. Her film Nomadland, which stars Frances McDormand as an urban nomad traveling around the U.S. looking for work, is also a favorite to win Best Picture after a number of wins across the awards season including a Golden Globe.
2020 - Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman
With her nomination for the revenge drama Promising Young Woman, Fennell becomes the second woman to be nominated for her debut. Though better known as an actor (most famous for playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown), she is also an Emmy nominee for her work as showrunner and writer on Season 2 of Killing Eve.
