Every Best Picture Winner Directed by a Woman

Eighty-one years passed between the first Academy Awards ceremony and the first Best Picture winner directed by a woman. In that span, the Academy handed out the top prize to films directed by Cecil B. DeMille and David Lean and Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, and to a great many other men whose names are less remembered, and to none of them whose name was on a birth certificate as Mary, Diane, Lina, Ava, or Greta.

Then it happened, and then it happened again eleven years later, and then again eleven months after that.

The list below is every Best Picture winner whose director was a woman. They share almost nothing else – one is an Iraq War thriller shot with handheld cameras, one is a contemplative road movie cast almost entirely with real-life van-dwellers, and one is a coming-of-age drama about a teenager in a Massachusetts fishing family – but they sit together in the record book as the only members of a very small club. The last of them, CODA, won Best Picture without its director being nominated for Best Director. Make of that what you will.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a film about an Army bomb disposal team in Iraq, made for fifteen million dollars by an independent director who had spent the previous decade in commercial purgatory after K-19: The Widowmaker flopped in 2002. It won six Oscars at the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7, 2010, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win either award. It also remains, when adjusted for inflation, the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in modern Oscar history.

The story of the night was the matchup. Bigelow was nominated against her ex-husband James Cameron, whose Avatar had become the highest-grossing film of all time and was sitting at over two billion dollars in box office receipts. The two had been married from 1989 to 1991 and remained on warm terms – Cameron attended an early screening of The Hurt Locker with his current wife – but the press could not resist the framing. They remain the only ex-spouses ever nominated against each other for Best Director.

Bigelow won, beat the most successful film of all time, and gave a speech that pointedly avoided the word ‘woman.' In her press conference afterward she said she hoped to be the first of many and that she would prefer to think of herself simply as a filmmaker. The next woman to win Best Director would not arrive for eleven years. The third would arrive the year after that. Bigelow was right about the first part.

Nomadland

Frances McDormand and Chloé Zhao spent four months in late 2018 living out of vans alongside their cast, most of whom were not actors but real-life nomads playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells – all of them van-dwellers in their own lives – appear under their own names. Zhao directed, produced, wrote, and edited the entire film herself. The result, Nomadland, is a road movie about a widow named Fern who drifts through the American West taking seasonal work, and it was filmed in much the same way Fern lives.

McDormand's win came at the expense of Viola Davis in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - itself a double acting loser that year.

The 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021, were held under unusual circumstances. The ceremony was scattered across multiple cities to accommodate pandemic protocols, and Bong Joon Ho announced Best Director from Seoul. He read Zhao’s name. She became the second woman to win, the first woman of color, and the first person ever to win directing for a film she had also produced, written, and edited. Nomadland took Best Picture as well.

The strangest moment came at the end. McDormand, accepting Best Picture as a producer, leaned back and howled at the ceiling. It was not a celebration. The film’s sound mixer, Michael Wolf Snyder, had died shortly before release, and the howl was for him. He had recorded, in McDormand’s words, the film’s every breath.

CODA

Apple paid twenty-five million dollars for CODA at Sundance in January 2021, a then-record acquisition fee for a film festival pickup. The film had been made for under ten million. Apple is reported to have spent over ten million more on the Oscar campaign that followed – meaning the company spent more selling the film than the filmmakers spent making it. It worked.

CODA is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl named Ruby, the only hearing member of her Deaf family in a Gloucester, Massachusetts fishing community. On March 27, 2022, it won Best Picture at the 94th Academy Awards. It was the first film distributed by a streaming service to take the top prize, the first Sundance premiere to do so in the festival’s four-decade history, and the first Best Picture winner with a predominantly Deaf cast. Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor and became the first Deaf male actor ever to win an Oscar. Sian Heder won Best Adapted Screenplay, accepting alongside an ASL interpreter on stage.

Heder, however, had not been nominated for Best Director. She is the only director on this list not to have won the directing prize, and her film is one of just six in Academy history to win Best Picture without its director receiving a directing nomination at all – the others being Wings, Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, Argo, and Green Book. CODA broke an 89-year statistical pattern. It is also, by some distance, the warmest of those six films.