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ACADEMY of
MOTION PICTURE ARTS and SCIENCES Best Director - Facts & Trivia (part 2) |
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ACADEMY of
MOTION PICTURE ARTS and SCIENCES Best Director - Facts & Trivia (part 2) |
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Best Director - Facts and Trivia (continued): Best Director and Best Picture Correlations: There is a direct correlation between the Best Picture and Director awards. Usually, the film voted Best Picture has been directed by the person named (or at least nominated as) Best Director. About a quarter of the time, however, in Academy history, the Best Picture and Best Director winners have been for different films: for example, see years 2005, 2002, 2000, 1998, 1989, 1981, 1972, 1967, 1956, 1952, 1951, 1949, 1948, 1940, 1937, 1936, 1935, 1931/32, 1930/31, 1928/29, 1927/28. In the first ten years of Oscar awards, seven of the
first 10 Best Picture winners didn't include any honor for the
directors beyond a nomination. [The exceptions were in the years 1929/30,
1932/33, and 1934, when the Academy honored the director as Best Director
for a corresponding Best Picture.] By 1941 and for the next two decades,
the Best Picture and Best Director winners were often correlated with
each other, except for the year 1948, when director Laurence Olivier's
Hamlet (1948) won Best Picture, while John Huston won Best Director
for
Conversely, it has often happened that a Best Director winner is not also honored with a simultaneous Best Picture win, especially in regards to John Ford and George Stevens:
It is very rare for a film to win the Best Picture Oscar while omitting the film's director from the Best Director nominations - this has happened only three times:
Conversely, director Frank Lloyd was the only person to win the Best Director Oscar for a film not nominated for Best Picture - The Divine Lady (1928/29). It is also very rare for all the Best Picture nominees and Best Director nominees to correspond. It has only happened six times in Oscar history, when there were only 5 nominees for both Best Picture and Best Director. As of 2009, when the Best Picture list was expanded to 10 nominees, it wasn't as remarkable an occurrence:
Most Best Picture Nominations: William Wyler - the Winning-est Best Picture Director
William Wyler holds the record for the most nominations and wins for his films in all categories: 127 nominations and 39 awards. Half of the nominations are in the major categories of Best Picture, Acting, and Directing. Wyler directed more nominated and winning acting performances (35 and 13, respectively) than anyone in history (see below). Wyler also holds the record for directing more Best Picture nominees (13) and more Best Picture winners (3) than anyone else. His nominated and winning films (marked with *):
Directors with the Most Consecutive Best Picture Nominations: 7 Consecutive Years: William Wyler
4 Consecutive Years: Frank Capra
Directors with the Most Acting Nominations and Acting Awards:
William Wyler also holds the record for directing performers to 35 acting nominations, with 13 performers winning an acting Oscar (in a lead or supporting role):
Elia Kazan directed 24 actors/actresses to Academy
Award nominations with 9 performers proceeding on to win Academy Awards,
and Fred Zinnemann directed 20 nominated performers to 6 Oscars (Gary
Cooper for To date, Taylor Hackford is the only director to have directed two black actors to Oscar-winning performances: Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and Jamie Foxx in Ray (2004). The only two actors/performers to direct themselves in a film and win a Best Actor Oscar are British actor Laurence Olivier as the title character in Hamlet (1948, UK), and Italian actor Roberto Benigni as Guido in Life is Beautiful (1998, It.). Female Directors: The Only Ones Nominated Italian film director Lina Wertmuller was the first woman to be nominated for Best Director (for Seven Beauties (1976, It.)). New Zealander Jane Campion was also nominated as Best Director for The Piano (1993), Sofia Coppola was nominated as Best Director for her Best Picture-nominated Lost in Translation (2003), as was Kathryn Bigelow for her Best Picture-nominated The Hurt Locker (2009). Sofia Coppola was the first American woman nominated for Best Director and only the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director, while Bigelow was the second American woman nominated as Best Director and only the fourth woman nominated in the category. Several films directed by women have been nominated for Best Picture (without corresponding Best Director nominations), including Randa Haines' Children of a Lesser God (1986), Penny Marshall's Awakenings (1990), and Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides (1991). Foreign-Born Director Nominees and Winners: In 2005, Ang Lee became the first Asian (or non-white) filmmaker to win Hollywood's main filmmaking honor for Brokeback Mountain (2005). In 2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu was the first Mexican director nominated for the top prize, for Babel (2006). The Mexican directing troika of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron took a combined 16 nominations for their films Babel (2006) (with seven nominations), Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (with six nominations) and Children of Men (2006) (with three nominations), respectively. In 1987, all five of the Best Director nominees were foreign-born:
The Most Best Director Nominations - Without a Single Win:
Films with Only a Best Director Nomination: (* denotes win)
Oldest and Youngest Best Directors: Note: The calculated time is from date of birth to the
date of either (1) the nominations announcement, or (2) the date of
the awards ceremony.
Other Notables: The first African-American to be nominated as Best Director was John Singleton for Boyz N the Hood (1991), followed by Lee Daniels who was the second African-American nominated director, for Precious (2009) - the film was also the first-ever Best Picture nominee to be directed by an African-American filmmaker. Spike Lee was never nominated for Best Director (only for screenwriting and documentary). With two nominations for Best Director, for Juno (2007) and Up in the Air (2009), 32 year-old Jason Reitman became the youngest filmmaker to have received two Oscar nominations for Best Director. There are only a handful of directors who have won (or been nominated for) the Best Director Oscar for their film debut:
Only three directors have received two best director nominations in the same year:
Only three duo directing teams have been nominated for Best Director in Oscars history:
Seven out of the first eleven Best Director Oscars were won by men named Frank: Frank Borzage, Frank Lloyd, and Frank Capra. The first Canadian to win Best Director was James Cameron, for Titanic (1997).Director W.S. (Woody) Van Dyke holds the single-year record for the most films to receive Oscar nominations (7):
Director Steven Spielberg holds the record for the most Oscars for multiple films in the same year:
Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers: Five individuals have won three Oscars (a triple-win) for Producing, Directing, and Writing in a single year:
Two individuals have received nominations for Producing, Acting, Directing, and Writing for the same film in one year:
In addition to Welles and Beatty, one individual has been nominated for Acting, Producing, and Writing for the same film:
In addition to Welles and Beatty, two individuals have been nominated simultaneously for Acting, Directing, and Writing for the same film:
Most of the following actors won their first Oscars as directors rather than as performers (except for Redford and Gibson, all were actors also nominated for their self-directed work):
The only two directors that ever directed themselves to a competitive acting Academy Award were:
Also, Best Director-winning Mel Gibson acted in and directed Braveheart (1995), the year's Best Picture. Likewise, Best Director-winning Clint Eastwood acted in and directed Best Picture-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004). And two Best Director Oscars were awarded to co-directors
Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise for Related Winners: 1948's Oscar-winning director John Huston directed both
his father (Walter Huston) to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and his
daughter (Anjelica) to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in respectively,
The Coppolas
became the second family with three generations of Oscar winners
- with Sofia Coppola's win for Best Original Screenplay for Lost
in Translation (2003). (Sofia's father Francis Ford Coppola is a
five-time winner and her grandfather, Carmine Coppola, won for musical
score on
Siblings Warren Beatty (Best Director for Reds (1981)) and Shirley MacLaine (Best Actress for Terms of Endearment (1983)) are related Oscar winners. Susan Sarandon won the Best Actress Oscar for Dead Man Walking (1995) (directed by her Best Director-nominated husband (unofficial live-in) Tim Robbins). She became the first star to win in a film directed by a spouse. Otherwise, it would be Frances McDormand who also won the Best Actress Oscar for Fargo (1996), directed by her spouse, husband Joel Coen. McDormand's brother-in-law, Ethan Coen, was the film's producer. Other wives nominated for films made by their director husbands:
To date, no female directors have had their starring husbands receive an Oscar nod. |
