Other women who should have won Best Director
Sunday, May 2, 2021 at 9:00AM 
At this year's Oscar ceremony, Chloé Zhao became only the second woman in Academy history to conquer the Best Director prize. The second one in 93 years. She follows in the steps of Kathryn Bigelow, whose Hurt Locker, like Nomadland, also won the Best Picture trophy. As a longtime proponent of the importance of women directors in film history, I rejoice at this result. However, the victory is bittersweet, a reminder of the chronic lack of recognition for these filmmakers. Many other women have deserved to win the Best Director Oscar across the years…
I've loved list-making for a long time, often combining such mania with a cinephile's tireless devotion. Like many others, I have my dream Oscar ballots, though they are more complicated and multifaceted than it's probably healthy or strictly necessary, encompassing various eligibility windows. Sometimes, I imagine my movie prizes by the year of the first public screening, including festival premieres (like IMDB). Or I go by US release, or by Portuguese release, or even by Academy eligibility which is another beast altogether, one that often ignores a lot of my favorite flicks.
When I say more women should have won, I don't mean it in an abstract undefined manner. I consider which films could have been voted on by Academy members, what the competition was and, of course, my taste. With all those factors under consideration and following strict eligibility rules and AMPAS' annual rulebooks, I can assure you I'd have given the Best Director Oscar to several women cineastes. Much more than the duo that won the trophy in real life.
Apologies for the complaining. This should be a happy moment as we cheer on Zhao's victory. Here's a good dose of positivity and movie love, recommendations, and joyful celebration to make up for it. In other words, here are ten of the women I'd have given the Best Director Oscar to and the films for which they should have won. In some cases, I might even award them more than one statuette. However, before somebody accuses me of passing out Oscars like candy, I limited myself in this write-up:
Ida Lupino, THE BIGAMIST (1954)
For some time in the mid-century, Ida Lupino was the only woman actively working as a feature director in Hollywood. The Bigamist, the last of her movies to be theatrically released, is the actress turned director's best and most exciting work, marrying melodrama with noir, social critique, and a potent undercurrent of melancholy. It's also the only time Lupino directed herself, taking on a leading role as part of the romantic triangle whose resolution ends in court. The last scenes of The Bigamist are a miracle of tonal plasticity, precisely shot and cut to suggest a hymn of bone-deep loneliness that only becomes apparent in the instant of recognition. If Dreyer had ever directed an American trial drama, it might have looked like Lupino's The Bigamist.
Elaine May, THE HEARTBREAK KID (1972)
My love for Elaine May isn't news, but it might surprise some to know I'd give her the Oscar over Coppola's The Godfather or Fosse's Cabaret. While I have much adoration for those classics, what May accomplished in The Heartbreak Kid is the sort of cinematic wizardry that's so unexpected as to appear as an impossibility magicked into reality. Instead of toning down the misogynistic aspects of Neil Simon's screenplay, the director chose to confront them head-on, twisting the film into an uncomfortable exercise in ugly subjectivity. In last year's May retrospective, I wrote: "It's a cruel affair, but the final product is a jewel of corrosive social critique, caustic humor at its most unforgiving and a character study made of equal parts empathy and hate." I stand by those words. What a masterpiece!
Euzhan Palcy, SUGAR CANE ALLEY (1984)
As previously explored in a piece I wrote about Euzhan Palcy, this Caribbean-born director is widely considered to be the first Black woman to direct a Hollywood feature. That movie was 1989's A Dry White Season starring Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando. As much as I love that calcinating apartheid drama, it's Palcy's debut that should have won her gold. Adapted from a Joseph Zobels novel, Sugar Cane Alley vibrates with as much humanistic warmth as indignant fury. While dramatizing misery, Palcy never errs on the side of exploitation, illuminating both the joy and the hardship in her characters' lives, materializing their world with great attention to historical detail, palpable textures, emotional candor. More than formally showy, it's a great work of subtle directing, gentle and measured while still packing a punch.
Agnès Varda, VAGABOND (1986)
From a director whose filmography is as defined by fiction narrative as by documentary works, Agnès Varda's Vagabond represents the perfect fusion of both modes of filmmaking. Starting with death and rewinding to life, the film unfolds in carefully staged vignettes that are as harsh as they are poetic, each tracking shot taking on a transcendent power. The cineaste is as interested in her protagonist's nomadic movements as in the spaces she inhabits, the landscapes she passes by, the people she touches, talks to, those who she sees, and who see her. Human connection in all its permutations is more important than the narrative gesture, observation taking precedence over characterization. Nonetheless, we often feel as if we know the title's vagrant woman in such ways we rarely get to know a big-screen hero. Her opaqueness is paradoxically transparent. It's one of those cinematic mysteries in Varda's wondrous cinema.
Julie Dash, DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1992)
Playing with ethereal archetypes and a particular historical milieu, Julie Dash produces something that's like a perilous dance between abstract poetry and spiritual anthropography. Picture and sound distend and dilute in Daughters of the Dust. They twist and spiral in indulgent slow-motion, inebriating beachy landscapes, natural light, and impeccable period costuming. The film crystallizes an isolated community through these means, one that's on the brink of dissolution. It captures a moment out of time, out of history. A moment about to be submerged in the waves of modernity, absorbed and irrevocably destroyed. Thus, the flick lives as a sort of invented memory, a celluloid witness to a past long forgotten. As fragile as the picture often feels, like a plume of smoke that can be torn with a whisper, it's also sturdy and solidly made, each cut so precise it feels like it would be impossible to mount the footage any other way.
Lucrecia Martel, LA CIÉNAGA (2001)
Like Palcy, Martel deserved an Oscar for her debut feature. It's astonishing how the Argentinean director came out of the gate making such assured films, instantly liberated from classic forms of storytelling, their rules, and dangerous paradigms. La Ciénaga is equal parts social critique and black-hearted comedy, a cynical portrait of an upper-class family's placid summer. The camera mocks and understands in the same instant, finding grotesque detail in the bourgeoisie's sweaty bodies, discovering old pains in their insincere interactions. Realism births humor in a plethora of different shapes, humid misery making for some laugh-inducing schadenfreude. It sometimes feels like a contemporary lycra-clad The Leopard, or perchance one of Buñuel's voracious class satires. Of course, comparing Martel to other filmmakers is vaguely futile. She's one of a kind, and La Ciénaga is proof of that.
Jane Campion, IN THE CUT (2003)
My favorite living filmmaker, Jane Campion, is an artist who works in voids and silences, conceiving her characters and their world through what is absent rather than what is shown. While The Piano is her most unsurmountable masterpiece, I think she should have won directing Oscars for other titles in her filmography. Namely, In the Cut, an oddball creation, overtly alienating, equally prone to controversy and misunderstanding. Campion's 2003 critical flop perverts the sex thriller, transforming it into a wild beast, inflamed with feminine desire and a taste for violent self-annihilation. Dancing on the edge, this film feels as if it can fall into kitschy mess at any moment. Somehow, it never loses its balance.
Andrea Arnold, AMERICAN HONEY (2016)
While being incredibly indulgent, this plotless road movie full of scamming youths and electric wanderlust is as fascinating an object as any disciplined jewel of controlled cinema. Arnold immerses the viewer into her character's diffused POV, attuning her camera to a sense of rudderless wonderment, excitement, poetic wandering. Guided by a masterfully curated soundtrack, American Honey often feels like it's tiptoeing on the limits that separate lyrical realism from outright exploitation. However, it never crosses the pernicious threshold, floating by on a cloud of pot smoke and boozy fumes, the hazy euphoria of teenage hormones, the hunger of desire. Watching this gem is to see Arnold at the peak of her ambition, tumbling along in the same step as her uncertain protagonist, as lost as she is. The direction is also just as gloriously alive.
Lynne Ramsay, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2018)
In the elliptical cinema of Lynne Ramsay, grief is the moment when death is glimpsed and the faint aftermaths of mourning. Violence is the glint of a knife and the dry pool of blood by a dead body. We only see the prologue and epilogue. The action itself is implied through hypnotic subterfuge, an insinuation, a muffled whisper in the distance. I remember when I watched You Were Never Really Here for the first time. It was at a film festival on the big screen, and it was like being transported to another dimension, so enraptured with the moving images that time itself seemed to bleed around me. The screening ended with me sitting open-mouthed in awe, asking myself how the entire duration of a movie might have gone by already. For me, the flick felt like a vivid dream that started and ended in the same breath. Just mesmerizing stuff, the sort of cinema whose greatness I still feel incapable of articulating in my writing.
Mati Diop, ATLANTICS (2019)
Bong Joon-ho is a fantastic Best Director victor, and Parasite is one of the most outstanding Best Picture winners in the Academy's 93-years-old history. Still, while I'd give the Korean film its most significant honor, I can't help but prefer another directorial achievement. Specifically, I'm invariably attracted to the phantasmagoria of moribund hopes and worn-out lust that makes up Mati Diop's Atlantics. There's an arresting simplicity to the director's work, a matter-of-factness that distracts the viewer from the monumental intersection of ideas happening under the surface. By the time the dead have risen, and the sea has given up its ghosts, one feels both surprised and in awe. How did Diop pull this off? Her work is sensual cinema at its most complicated, supernatural fable at its most cerebral, art at its most intoxicating.
Who are some of the women you think should have won the Best Director Oscar already? Do you agree with any of my picks?
Reader Comments (65)
Love the Mati Diop praise. I wish she had been in the Best Director conversation more.
As for women who I think deserved to win the Oscar:
Ava DuVernay, SELMA
Dee Rees, MUDBOUND
Lorene Scafaria, HUSTLERS
Eliza Hittman, NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS
Great list of films suggested. I've not seen some and I hope to based off your recommendation. I agree absolutely with the Dash mention and whether it's the year the film first premiered or it's actual eligibility release it would be my favourite film of either year.
Some women I'd award based on what I'd seen in the invidiual years would include
Barbara Loden, Wanda (1971)
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Celine Sciamma, The Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Kelly Reichard, First Cow
There are of course many other women I'd nominate across the years but until that article is written I'll stick to my choices for winning women.
I hope that the Zhao win is a positive step forward and that we don't have to wait 10+ years in between female winners again.
A big yes to Ida Lupino!! While I think The Bigamist is a terrific film I would have handed it to her for her precise direction of The Hitch-Hiker.
Sarah Polley could have pop-up in directing for Away From Her.
Jennifer Kent deserved a nomination for both The Babadook and The Nightingale.
Last year Lulu Wang deserved a nomination for The Farewell.
This year also Shannon Murphy could have been a fair choice.
Sofia Coppola, MARIE ANTOINETTE
Greta Gerwig, LADY BIRD
Sarah Polley for Away from Her(2006).
When I saw The Father I couldn't help thinking about this film. And forgive me those who disagree, but I would give Julie Christie the second Oscar.
Chloe Zhao should have won 2 years ago for The Rider and her chief competition should have been Debra Granik for Leave No Trace. Barbara Loden for Wanda and Lina Wertmuller for Love and Anarchy are also favorites of mine.
And Mai Zetterling for Night Games -one of the most decadent films ever made.
Maybe I shouldn't be in such a hurry to post, because I just remembered Larissa Shapitko, the Ukrainian director who died much too young in a car crash. The two films I've seen by her, Wings and The Ascent, are both masterpieces.
Elaine May is the best choice here. Neil Simon infamously demanded that his scripts be filmed exactly as written. During shooting of The Heartbreak Kid, Simon’s beloved first wife was in the final stages of cancer. May convinced Simon to let go of the screenplay to aid his wife and their two young daughters.
May cast Cybill Shepherd so beautiful but uncomfortable in The Last Picture Show to be the Shiksa who tempts Lenny Cantrow to abandon his bride on their honeymoon. Shepherd credits May with teaching her about movie acting. She said May worked with her to learn to listen.
There is a terrific scene in the film when the anti-Semitic father and the Jewish suitor meet over dinner. May seats Shepherd between Oscar nominated Eddie Albert and Charles Grodin. The camera is attentive to Shepherd as she listens to the two actors spar. It is a tremendous scene where the audience is compelled to discern the merits of beauty.
Throughout the film, May focuses on silent women to convey how we should judge events. When Lenny takes Lila to a restaurant and informs her that he is ending their marriage on their honeymoon, the camera cuts from the drama to the faces of the women within earshot who are listening. Their expressions are eloquent. May again uses eavesdropping to provide insight into the attitudes at restricted hotels and restaurants that prohibit Jews from entry.
I find The Heartbreak Kid an endlessly inventive directorial achievement that grows richer with repeated viewings.
Great movies! I don’t agree with any of your picks tough. I would had given best director to four women:
1993) Jane Campion, The Piano (who is your best director for this year?)
1999) Claire Denis, Beau Travail
2017) Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
2020) Chloe Zhao, Nomadland
Totally agree with Ida Lupino for The Bigamist and Julie Dash for Daughters of the Dust. I would like to propose Barbara Kopple for Harlen County USA.
Julie Christie should have won the Oscar for Away From Her - what a heartbreaking masterpiece of filmmaking.
I love that you included Julie Dash for Daughters of the Dust and Agnes Varda for Vagabond. I would also include Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation, Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty, Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird, and Amy Heckerling for Clueless. The last choice may be controversial, but has any film from 1995 been as fondly remembered?
Kasi Lemmons for Eve's Bayou
Kathryn Bigelow for Strange Days
Nicole Holofcener for any film (though I really love Lovely and Amazing)
Eliza Hittman Never, Rarely,Sometimes, Always
Mary Harron American Psycho
So many talented women working in multiple genres. I hope this is the beginning of a "movement not a moment". (Reuben Cannon)
By the way Be Kind Rewind has a great video on the 7 women director nominees.
I understand the sentiment, but it's reaching too far - to say these women deserved an Oscar over true classics that actually won or were nominated. Like saying that Elaine May should have won for an average movie over the classic The Godfather.
I can’t get past In the Cut over Return of the King (or even Lost in Translation). Campion has done much better elsewhere.
I would also have definitely nominated Sarah Polley for Away From Her. And Julie Christie indeed deserved that Oscar.
(1995) Amy Heckerling, Clueless
(1997) Kasi Lemmons, Eve's Bayou
(1999) Catherine Breillat, Romance
(2011) Dee Rees, Pariah
(2019) Claire Denis, High Life
Some Asian representative here. Ann Hui, Summer Snow, 1995. Let's not forget that plenty of great documentaries are actually directed by women.
Love the suggestions Polley & Holofcener, Lovely and Amazing is also my favourite of hers. Niki Caro I think is a great talent and would not have been upset if she featured for Whale Rider or North Country.
I'm going to leave out obviously non-Oscar types of movies, like JEANNE DIELMAN and NITRATE KISSES, but I'll submit/second these For Your Consideration....
Lynn Ramsey: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
Claire Denis: TROUBLE EVERY DAY or BEAU TRAVAIL
Andria Arnold: AMERICAN HONEY
Kasi Lemmons: EVE'S BAYOU (seriously!)
Lina Wertmuller: LOVE AND ANARCHY (no, not SEVEN BEAUTIES)
Gillian Armstrong: HIGHTIDE
Agnes Varda: CLEO FROM 5 TO SEVEN
Sally Potter: THE TANGO LESSON, YES (no, not ORLANDO)
Agnieszka Holland: EUROPA EUROPA
Liv Ullmann: FAITHLESS
Lea Pool: SET ME FREE
Sciamma, not Diop, for 2019.
Hi Claudio, good piece, but could you clarify who won best director in the following years you mention these female achievements in:
1954, 1984, 1986, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2016, 2018.
Thanking you in advance.
Dorothy Arzner for "Craig's Wife" (1936).
I think Barbra Streisand deserved at least a nomination for Yentl.
I also second Wertmuller for Love and Anarchy, and would add Margarethe Von Trotta for "Marianne and Juliane," a vastly underrated political film that is at least as good as the better known "Lost Honor of Katharina Blum."
Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) over Peter Jackson.
And I could back Lynne Ramsay for both We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here.
Chen-
1954: Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront)
1984: Milos Forman (Amadeus)
1986: Oliver Stone (Platoon)
1992: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven)
2001: Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind)
2003: Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
2016: Damien Chazelle (La La Land)
2018: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
I'd rather give the Oscar to Jane Campion for The Piano, snubbing Spielberg's double whammo of 1993, and Sofia Coppola probably could have two by now, with Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette... I wouldn't have complained if Isabel Coixet won for My Life without Me, or Kathryn Bigelow won for Detroit alongside The Hurt Locker.
Yes to Elaine May and The Heartbreak Kid and to the suggestion of Lynne Ramsay for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Both brilliant explorations of human darkness.
@ Davide
Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne & Juliane) is also one of the few theatrical films (rather than TV movies or filmed plays) that stars the late great Jutta Lampe, who passed away in December. My favorite German actress.
People throw away words like Masterpieces and Icons too easily now, but You Were Never Really Here is just that good.
Second Amy for Mai Zetterling and LOVING COUPLES (what a great film! I have the framed one sheet in my guest room). Davide's right about MARIANNE & JULIANE and Streisand for YENTL.
The way I'm playing this game, though, is different. With just a couple of exceptions per decade there is no absolute best in these major categories. Is someone seriously going to argue that there is really a best in 75 between Robert Altman, Milos Forman, Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellilni, and Sidney Lumet back in 1976? And you could have expanded to six and added Spielberg for JAWS and still had a justifiable six way tie. (Actually, the one I'd eliminate first would be Forman, who ended up winning.)
So the way I play here is not, to say any of these women should have beat the men who were up that year but to say these women would have been worthy winners in this category in general. I mean you could argue all day over who was best: Kubrick, Fellini, or Altman, but it would be a fool's argument.
I know it’s not the most artistic choice but I’m always surprised A League of Their Own didn’t get ANY Oscar nominations. It’s such a well made audience pleaser.
It’s always great to read nice words about Euzhan Palcy, a talented director but also a trailblazer and a very charming lady. Pity she hasn’t made more films through the years.
Regarding directors I hope Ampas will consider more or again in the future: Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Sarah Polley, Jennifer Kent, Alice Wu, Lulu Wang, Dee Rees, Malgorzata Szumowska, Claire Denis, Isabel Sandoval, Mati Diop, Alice Rohrwacher, Deepa Mehta
Gillian Armstrong, My Brilliant Career.
I was lucky enough this week to stumble upon The Rider at Dollar Tree. Well worth a buck - the movie is beautiful. The end made me cry. Chloe Zhao is so skilled with non-professional actors.
My list:
Ida Lupino
Agnes Varda - Cleo from 5 to 7
Jane Campion - The Piano
Sofia Coppola - Marie Antoniette
Kathryn Bigelow - Zero Dark Thirty
Dee Rees - Mudbound
Greta Getting - Little Women
Ladine Labaki - Cafarnaum
Debra Granik - Winter's Bone
Chloe Zhao - Nomadland
Marienne Heller - Can You Forgive Me?
Penny Marshall - Big
Lana and Lilly Wachowski - The Matrix
Valerie Faris - Little Miss Sunshine
Lone Sherfig - An Education
Penny Marshall for Awakenings
I second, triple and quadruple all the folks saying Julie Christie should have won the Oscar for her shattering work in Away from Her. I am still not over that loss.
Kathryn Bigelow should have two Oscars--the second should be for Zero Dark Thirty. One of the best-directed films of the last decade.
Your picks are very... personal, to say the least.
Desagree with every single one e some are really terrible choices.
I wish we could stop trying to rewrite history according to political waves - was in the cut the movie with the best direction in its year? Elaine May over Bob Fosse and Coppola?
Senseless. Lacks historical perspective.
1. Chantal Akerman-Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
2. Agnes Varda-Vagabond
3. Julie Dash-Daughters of the Dust
4. Jane Campion-The Piano
5. Kasi Lemmons-Eve's Bayou
6. Claire Denis-Beau Travail
7. Lucrecia Martel-La Cienaga
8. Lynne Ramsay-Morvern Callar
9. Sofia Coppola-Lost in Translation & Somewhere
10. Andrea Arnold-Fish Tank
Thank you for the feedback, guys. I'm especially thankful for the many movies you've been mentioning. Some of which I haven't yet seen and will make sure to check out now. For instance, I think I must watch Zetterling's NIGHT MOVES tout de suite. Thanks, Amy Camus, for the recommendation.
To those citing such amazing work such as Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL, Sheptiko's THE ASCENT or Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, I only picked films that were in AMPAS' eligibility lists. Unfortunately, those pictures weren't included so, even if some Academy member had wanted to vote for them, they wouldn't have been able to. As said in this piece, I have a lot of lists. Some of them imagine these awards without such matters as Oscar eligibility and those three directors feature heavily in those.
Also, yes, my picks are very personal and this is a reflection of my taste. Just because I like some films more than others, doesn't mean I lack historical perspective. You can say you disagree without implying that my choices come from dishonesty, a supposed need for political correctness, or stupidity. This is art, there are no objective truths, just a bunch of people with different opinions and perspectives. I'm sure there are some films you love that I consider terrible and vice-versa.
To answer your question, Luc, my 1993 Best Director lineup, according to Oscar eligibility, looks like this:
Jane Campion, THE PIANO
Krzysztof Kieslowski, THREE COLORS: BLUE
Mike Leigh, NAKED
Hayao Miyazaki, MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO - winner!
Sally Potter, ORLANDO
I love Jane Campion...like ADORE her, but in 2003 the only director victor is an entirely different woman; Sofia Coppola. What she accomplished with Lost in Translation is best of the decade right there.
Zetterling's NIGHT GAMES is... interesting. But I really think LOVING COUPLES is by far her best film.
You lost me at Elaine May.
C’mon.
Over Cabaret and The Godfather?
Seriously?
Glad to see the Kasi Lemmons love for Eve's Bayou. But I was even more moved by her work on Talk to Me, getting Oscar worthy performances from Don Cheadle, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Taraji P. Henson.
Yhank you Richter Scale. It's comforting to see Claudio slip up and be sloppy for once, despite as eloquent as ever.
^Here, Here!!
As a lists obsessive I have an archive of films and I'm a little disappointed with myself to discover that I have just eight women in the top as my favorite directorial achievements:
Jane Campion - The Piano (1993)
Marie Pérennou with Claude Nuridsany - Microcosmos (1996)
Ician Bollair - Te Doy Mis Ojos (2003)
Miranda July - Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Lucrecia Martel - La Mujer Sin Cabeza (2008)
Alejandra Sánchez - Agnus Dei: Cordero de Dios (2011)
Claudia Sainte-Luce - Los Insólitos Peces Gato (2013)
Issa López - Vuelven (2017)