Academy Award for Best Director
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The Academy Award for Achievement in Directing (Best Director) is one of the Awards of Merit presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to directors working in the motion picture industry. While nominations for Best Director are made by members in the Academy's Directing branch, the award winners are selected by the Academy membership as a whole.[citation needed]
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[edit] History
Throughout the past 80 years, accounting for ties and repeat winners, AMPAS has presented a total of 81 Best Director awards to 61 different directors. At the 1st Academy Awards (1927/1928), there were two directing awards -- one for "Dramatic Direction" and one for "Comedy Direction". The Comedy Direction award was eliminated the next year and, indeed, the awards have overwhelmingly favored dramatic films ever since. At both the 34th Academy Awards (1961) and the 80th Academy Awards (2007), Best Director was presented to a co-directing team, rather than to an individual director.
The earliest years of the award were marked by inconsistency and confusion. In the Academy Awards' first year, actors and others such as cinematographers were nominated for all of their films produced during the qualifying period. However, since the directing award was for "directing" rather than "best director", it honored the director in association with only a single film -- thus Janet Gaynor has two Frank Borzage films listed after her Best Actress nomination, but only one of them earned Borzage a directing nomination. The second year, the directing award followed the others in listing all of a director's work during the qualifying period, resulting in Frank Lloyd being nominated for three of his films -- but, even more confusingly, only one of them was listed on the final award as the film for which he won. Finally, for the 1930/31 awards, this confusing system was replaced by the current system in which a director is nominated for a single film.
Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 80 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 59 have also been awarded Best Director.[1] Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s): Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years: Lewis Milestone (1927/28) and Frank Lloyd (1928/29).
Due to strict rules promulgated by the Directors Guild of America (DGA), only one individual may claim screen credit as a film's director. (This rule is designed to prevent rights and ownership issues and to eliminate lobbying for director credit by producers and actors.) However, the DGA may create an exception to this "one director per film" rule if two co-directors seeking to share director credit for a film qualify as an "established duo". In the history of the Academy Awards, established duos have been nominated for Best Director only three times: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (who won for West Side Story in 1961); Warren Beatty and Buck Henry (who were nominated for Heaven Can Wait in 1978), and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (who won for No Country for Old Men in 2007).
Eight people have been nominated for both Best Director and Best Actor for the same film. Warren Beatty did so twice (Heaven Can Wait and Reds), as did Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby). The other six included: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), Laurence Olivier (Hamlet), Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V), Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves), and Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful). No one has ever won both awards. Four won Best Director, but not Best Actor: Allen, Beatty (for Reds), Costner, and Eastwood (on both occasions). Two won Best Actor, but not Best Director: Benigni and Olivier. Finally, three lost both nominations: Beatty (for Heaven Can Wait), Branagh, and Welles.
Many revered directors have never won the award, including: Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Charles Chaplin, Stephen Daldry, Federico Fellini, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ernst Lubitsch, George Lucas, Sidney Lumet, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Arthur Penn, Ridley Scott, King Vidor, Peter Weir and Orson Welles. The list of highly regarded directors who have never received nominations includes: Luis Buñuel, Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, John Frankenheimer, Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee and Sergio Leone. No female director has ever won this award, and only three have even been nominated: Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Lina Wertmuller.
No Best Director winning film is lost, though the nominee The Patriot is lost and nominee Sorrell and Son is incomplete. Drag (one of the films for which Frank Lloyd was nominated but did not win in 1929) has long been presumed lost, though there are rumors of its survival, possibly only on videotape, and the Vitaphone discs of its soundtrack survive. The Comedy Direction winner, Two Arabian Knights, was believed lost for many years but was preserved in the Howard Hughes archive and has been broadcast (along with another first-year nominee produced by Hughes and believed lost, The Racket) on Turner Classic Movies.
[edit] Superlatives
Category | Name | Superlative | Year | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Most Awards | John Ford | 4 awards | 1952 | Awards resulted from 5 nominations. |
Most Nominations | William Wyler | 12 nominations | 1965 | Nominations resulted in 3 awards. |
Oldest Winner | Clint Eastwood | 74 years old | 2004 | Million Dollar Baby |
Oldest Nominee | John Huston | 79 years old | 1985 | Prizzi's Honor |
Youngest Winner | Norman Taurog | 32 years old | 1930/31 | Skippy |
Youngest Nominee | John Singleton | 24 years old | 1991 | Boyz N the Hood |
John Ford is the only director with four Best Director Oscars, followed by Frank Capra and William Wyler, with three apiece. Wyler has the most nominations, 12. Robert Altman, Clarence Brown, Alfred Hitchcock, and King Vidor are tied for the most nominations without a win, at five each.
Only two directors have received consecutive Best Director awards: John Ford for 1940's The Grapes of Wrath and 1941's How Green Was My Valley, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for 1949's A Letter to Three Wives and 1950's All About Eve.
[edit] Multiple nominations
The following 81 directors have received multiple Best Director nominations. The list is sorted by the number of total awards (with the number of total nominations listed in parentheses).
[edit] Winners and nominees
Each Academy Award ceremony is listed chronologically below along with the winner of the Academy Award for Directing and the film associated with the award. In the column next to the winner of each award are the other nominees for best director. Following the Academy's practice, the films below are listed by the years of their Los Angeles qualifying run, which is usually (but not always) in the year of release; for example, the Oscar for Best Director of 1999 was announced during the award ceremony held in 2000.
[edit] 1920s
In the first year only, the award was separated into Dramatic Direction and Comedy Direction.
Year | Winner film |
Nominated |
---|---|---|
1927/1928 Dramatic |
Frank Borzage – Seventh Heaven |
Herbert Brenon – Sorrell and Son King Vidor – The Crowd |
Comedy | Lewis Milestone – Two Arabian Knights |
Charles Chaplin – The Circus Ted Wilde – Speedy |
1928/1929 | Frank Lloyd – The Divine Lady |
Lionel Barrymore – Madame X Harry Beaumont – The Broadway Melody Irving Cummings – In Old Arizona Ernst Lubitsch – The Patriot |
[edit] 1930s
[edit] 1940s
[edit] 1950s
[edit] 1960s
[edit] 1970s
[edit] 1980s
[edit] 1990s
[edit] 2000s
[edit] International presence
As the Academy Awards are based in the United States and are centered on the Hollywood film industry, the majority of Academy Award winners have been Americans. Nonetheless, there is significant international presence at the awards, as evidenced by the following list of winners of the Academy Award for Best Director.
- Australia: Mel Gibson
- Canada: James Cameron
- Czechoslovakia: Miloš Forman
- France: Roman Polanski
- Italy: Bernardo Bertolucci
- New Zealand: Peter Jackson
- Poland: Roman Polanski
- Taiwan: Ang Lee
- United Kingdom: Richard Attenborough, David Lean, Sam Mendes, Anthony Minghella, Carol Reed, Tony Richardson, and John Schlesinger
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Oscars.org (official Academy site)
- Oscar.com (official ceremony promotional site)
- The Academy Awards Database (official site)
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