9 Historic Oscar Wins for Directing

At the 22nd Oscars in 1950, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz won his first best directing Oscar for A Letter to Three Wives, a postwar melodrama about three women reflecting on their various marriages. The film was critically and commercially lauded upon release and nabbed Mankiewicz not only the directing award, but also best adapted screenplay.

The following year, Mankiewicz won best director again, this time for All About Eve, the story of aging theater star Margo Channing (played by Bette Davis) and the young woman desperate to usurp her. The film was nominated for a whopping 14 Oscars and went home with six, including best picture.

Mankiewicz was nominated twice thereafter, for 5 Fingers (1953) and 1973’s Sleuth but never secured another win in the category. He also received one additional nomination for best screenplay for The Barefoot Contessa (1953).

John Ford won his first best director award in 1936 for The Informer, a little-known movie about the Irish War of Independence. The film’s political narrative was intentionally softened to “circumvent controversy and pass the censors” in the United States and United Kingdom, according to Mark Connelly in The IRA on Film and Television.

Five years later, Ford won another best director award for his 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story The Grapes of Wrath, about Oklahoma sharecroppers making their way to California during the Great Depression. Similar to criticisms of The Informer, studio head David O. Selznick worried the movie would be accused of portraying Communist leanings.

Ford’s last two Oscar wins were for films based in Ireland, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. Both movies starred Irish actor Maureen O’Hara, and The Quiet Man reunited Ford with his frequent collaborator John Wayne.

Ford also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon in 1973.

For their work on the Broadway musical adaptation of West Side Story, director Robert Wise and choreographer Jerome Robbins became the first co-directors to win an Oscar in 1962. The film had a whopping 11 nominations and won 10 of them, losing out only on best adapted screenplay.

Robbins also won a special honorary award for his achievements in dance work he did on the feature. Both Wise and Robbins were highly regarded directors throughout their entire careers. Robbins won five Tony awards in his life, alongside his Oscars. Wise was a two-time best director winner in his career. He won another Oscar for The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews.

Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee became the first Asian director to win the award in 2006 with the Western romantic drama Brokeback Mountain. The movie, an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, follows two cowboys (played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) as they fall in love and reconnect over several years.

Although Lee won best director, Brokeback Mountain didn’t win best picture, losing to the Paul Haggis drama Crash instead. This caused controversy as critics felt the movie lost due to homophobia. More than 800 supporters rallied to place an ad in Variety after the ceremony to thank Lee for “for transforming countless lives through the most honored film of the year.”

Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen started working together in 1984 with their debut feature, Blood Simple. In 1996, the Coen brothers received Oscar acclaim for their 1996 movie Fargo, though only Joel was credited for the movie’s best director nomination.

In 2007, the pair were nominated as a directing duo for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bloody western No Country for Old Men, the story of a mild-mannered man (played by Josh Brolin) who discovers a satchel full of money in the desert and must shake off a villainous hitman played by Javier Bardem.

Accepting their award, Joel Coen acknowledged the power of collaborating with his brother: “Ethan and I have been making stories with movie cameras since we were kids...Honestly, what we do now doesn’t feel that much different from what we were doing then...We’re very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox.”

Kathryn Bigelow broke the Oscars’ best director glass ceiling when she became the first woman to win the award for her war-centric feature The Hurt Locker in 2010. At that point in the ceremony’s 82-year history, she was only the fourth woman ever nominated in the category and only the second American woman. Notably, she competed against her ex-husband James Cameron, who was nominated for Avatar.

Bigelow has shunned being labeled a female filmmaker in her career and didn’t mention the record she broke when she gave her Oscars speech. “I hope I’m the first of many [women], and of course, I’d love to just think of myself as a filmmaker. And I long for the day when that modifier can be a moot point,” she said backstage.

Mexican-born director Alfonso Cuarón won the best director Oscar in 2014 for the space drama Gravity, becoming both the first Mexican director to win as well as the first from a Latin American country. Gravity stoked Cuarón’s lifelong interest in space, which he fell in love with at the age of 7 after watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. He drew inspiration for Gravity from the 1922 film A Trip to the Moon in addition to features like Woman in the Moon (1929) and Marooned (1969).

Since Cuarón’s historic win, other Mexican directors have also earned the prestigious trophy. In 2015, filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu won for Birdman in 2015 and again for The Revenant in 2016. Guillermo del Toro won best director at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018 for his work on The Shape of Water. Cuarón won another best director award for his semi-autobiographical Roma in 2019.

At the age of 32, director Damien Chazelle became the youngest best director winner for his musical La La Land in 2017. The movie, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, is a tribute to Old Hollywood-style musicals like Broadway Melody of 1940, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Stone and Gosling play a young couple who, over the course of several years, fall in love and struggle to remain connected due to professional struggles in their lives.

Beyond Chazelle's trophy, the film won an additional five Oscars. The night went down in infamy when presenter Faye Dunaway accidentally announced the movie had won best picture when she was handed the wrong envelope. Two minutes later, the mistake was noticed, and Moonlight was revealed as the actual winner.

Eleven years after Kathryn Bigelow’s victory, director Chloé Zhao became the first female director of color to win for her feature Nomadland in 2021. The film tells the story of a middle-aged woman named Fern (Frances McDormand) who travels via RV after losing her job.

Zhao has listed directors like Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog as influences in her career. She was nominated for best director again for 2025's Hamnet, an adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel about William Shakespeare and the creation of the stage play “Hamlet.”