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)
Chen -- Oops, forgot to add that. You're right :) Also, thanks Richter Scale for adding that information to the comments.
César Gaytan -- So many exciting recommendations that I haven't seen. Of those I've seen, I can say I adore Martel's direction of The Headless Woman. I think she deserved a nomination for that one.
@ Cláudio
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I agree that there should be more nominations for female directors. Not all of those particular inclusions, though. I've got flashbacks to Leo's wife from "The Revenant" being mentioned in the article among snubbed people of color who should have been nominated.
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So many sublime filmmakers mentioned here - Campion, Akerman , Varda, Coppola, Ramsay, Arnold, Dash, Shepitko, Sciamma, Gerwig, Reichardt, Denis, Ullmann...
I take Claudio’s point that several of the above made films that were ineligible for Oscars. However, it’s nice just shouting out names of the incredibly talented female directors who’ve moved us. I’d certainly add Mia Hansen-Love, especially for ‘Things To Come’. I’m also a huge fan of Samira Makhmalbaf’s ‘The Apple’. However, my favourite film directed by a woman is ‘Innocence’ by Lucile Hadzihalilovic - I would have died and gone to heaven if the Academy had recognised her for this miraculous work of art.
Penny Marshall would be my winner in 1988 for BIG! Really nails the relationships, tone, and pathos in what could have easily been a forgettable matinee movie. Should have been a three-time nominee (also for AWAKENINGS and A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN).
I do wonder what the reception to Elaine May's MIKEY & NICKY would have been like had she been able to make the movie she wanted to make without studio tension/interference and had it gotten an actual release at the time. Definitely amongst my nominees, maybe my winner. Incredible year.
A few favorite line-ups where I would have had a majority female slate:
2020: Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, Chloe Zhao (winner)
2019: Greta Gerwig (winner), Marielle Heller, Lulu Wang
2003: Jane Campion, Niki Caro, Sofia Coppola (winner), Nancy Meyers
1998: Lisa Cholodenko, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers
At least, we should think about other female director's nominations:
Alice Rohrwacher should have been nominated for Lazzaro Felice.
Same goes for Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann.
Also Vagda's Cleo... Bigelow for Detroit.
Martel's big directorial achievement for me is Zama, which haven't even been considered as part of foreign language shortlisted films.
I agree upon Campion's incomprehensible loss for The Piano and Coppola for Maria Antoinette or Lost in Translation.
Mira Nair
Perhaps this director will elicit some strong reactions. Perhaps no one really reads my comments. But I think Barbra Streisand deserved an Oscar for Yentl. Although I realize that, Funny Girl aside, the Academy never really took her seriously.
I'd also second giving Greta Gerwig the Gold for Lady Bird. I loved it so much the 1st time, I risked watching it again, and loved it just as much the 2nd time.
@rrich7 On the previous page of comments, you'll see that there were others who shared your view regarding Yentl. I remember that at the time of its release, Spielberg extolled Streisand's directorial debut as the best since Orson Welles'.
Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay was nominated for best foreign film, so if the convention is that the nomination/award is formally for the country that nominated the film, but informally for the director, then Nair can be considered as a female nominee for directing. Other female directors whose films were nominated for best Foreign/International film since 2000 are:
Jasmila Zbanic (Quo Vadis, Aida? 2020)
Tamara Kotesvka (Honeyboy, 2019)
Nadine Labacki (Capernaum, 2018)
Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann, 2016)
Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness, 2011)
Susanne Bier (In a Better World, 2010 WINNER; After the Wedding, 2006)
Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009)
Deepa Mehta (Water, 2006)
Christina Comencini (The Beast in the Heart, 2005)
Paula von der Oest (Zus & Zo, 2002)
Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa, 2002 WIINNER)
Agnes Jaoui (The Taste of Others, 2000)
Since each country can only nominate 1 film, this suggests that the film industries in many countries are much more supportive of female directors than our own has been.
@Mariza and @John From:
What is it with you if Cláudio's picks diverge from the canonized classics (LOTR and The Godfather/Cabaret)? His picks, his taste, his life. Get over it.
Laughable list. Except Varda, obviously. But in all other years Academy chose better men so... Well, not in 2001 but even then many men would have been better choices than Martel (David Lynch, Robert Altman, Peter Jackson etc.)
And if anyone was robbed by Spielberg in 1994, it was James Ivory, not Jane Campion.
What's laughable is when someone hides under online anonymity and then proceed to be an asshole to someone's work.
@JuanCarlos: Whatever. :) List is still laughable.