Academy Award for Best Directing
Academy Award for Best Directing | |
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Awarded for | "Excellence in cinematic direction achievement" |
Country | United States |
Presented by | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences |
First awarded | 1929 (for direction in films released during the 1927/1928 film season) |
Currently held by | Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) |
Official website | oscars.org |
The Academy Award for Best Directing (Best Director), usually known as the Best Director Oscar, is one of the Awards of Merit presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to directors working in the motion picture industry. While nominations for Best Directing are made by members in the Academy's Directing branch, the award winners are selected by the Academy membership as a whole.
Contents
History[edit]
Throughout the past 86 years, AMPAS has presented a total of 89 Best Directing awards to 66 different directors. At the 1st Academy Awards (1927/1928), there were two directing awards—one for "Dramatic Direction" and one for "Comedy Direction". The Comedy Direction award was eliminated the next year and, indeed, the awards have overwhelmingly favored dramatic films ever since. At both the 34th Academy Awards (1961) and the 80th Academy Awards (2007), Best Directing was presented to a co-directing team, rather than to an individual director.
The earliest years of the award were marked by inconsistency and confusion. In the Academy Awards' first year, actors and others such as cinematographers were nominated for all of their films produced during the qualifying period. However, since the directing award was for "directing" rather than "best director", it honored the director in association with only a single film—thus Janet Gaynor has two Frank Borzage films listed after her Best Actress nomination, but only one of them earned Borzage a directing nomination. The second year, the directing award followed the others in listing all of a director's work during the qualifying period, resulting in Frank Lloyd being nominated for three of his films—but, even more confusingly, only one of them was listed on the final award as the film for which he won. Finally, for the 1931 awards, this confusing system was replaced by the current system in which a director is nominated for a single film.
The Academy Awards for Best Directing and Best Picture have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 86 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 62 have also been awarded Best Directing.[1] Only four films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated: Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Argo (2012). The only two Best Directing winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are notably during the early years; Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights (1927/28) and Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady (1928/29).
Only four women have ever been nominated for Best Directing: Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties (1976), Jane Campion for The Piano (1993), Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (2003), and Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (2009). Bigelow was the first, and to date the only, female director to win the Academy Award for Best Directing.
Rules[edit]
Due to strict rules declared by the Directors Guild of America (DGA), only one individual may claim screen credit as a film's director. (This rule is designed to prevent rights and ownership issues and to eliminate lobbying for director credit by producers and actors.) However, the DGA may create an exception to this "one director per film" rule if two co-directors seeking to share director credit for a film qualify as an "established duo". In the history of the Academy Awards, established duos have been nominated for Best Directing only four times: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (who won for West Side Story in 1961); Warren Beatty and Buck Henry (who were nominated for Heaven Can Wait in 1978), and Joel and Ethan Coen (who won for No Country for Old Men in 2007 and were nominated again for True Grit in 2010).
Multiple nominations[edit]
The following 91 directors have received multiple Best Directing nominations. The list is sorted by the number of total awards (with the number of total nominations listed in parentheses).
Winners and nominees[edit]
Each Academy Award ceremony is listed chronologically below along with the winner of the Academy Award for Directing and the film associated with the award. In the column next to the winner of each award are the other nominees for best directing. Following the Academy's practice, the films below are listed by the years of their Los Angeles qualifying run, which is usually (but not always) in the year of release; for example, the Oscar for Best Directing of 1999 was announced during the award ceremony held in 2000.
For the first six ceremonies, the eligibility period spanned two calendar years. For example, the 2nd Academy Awards presented on April 3, 1930, recognized films that were released between August 1, 1928 and July 31, 1929. Starting with the 7th Academy Awards, held in 1935, the period of eligibility became the full previous calendar year from January 1 to December 31.
1920s[edit]
In the first year only, the award was separated into Dramatic Direction and Comedy Direction.
Year | Winner film |
Nominated |
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1927/28 (Dramatic) | Frank Borzage – 7th Heaven |
Herbert Brenon – Sorrell and Son King Vidor – The Crowd |
1927/28 (Comedy) | Lewis Milestone – Two Arabian Knights |
Ted Wilde – Speedy |
1928/29 | Frank Lloyd – The Divine Lady |
Lionel Barrymore – Madame X Harry Beaumont – The Broadway Melody Irving Cummings – In Old Arizona Frank Lloyd – Drag and Weary River Ernst Lubitsch – The Patriot |
1929/30 | Lewis Milestone – All Quiet on the Western Front |
Clarence Brown – Anna Christie and Romance Robert Z. Leonard – The Divorcée Ernst Lubitsch – The Love Parade King Vidor – Hallelujah |
1930s[edit]
1940s[edit]
1950s[edit]
1960s[edit]
1970s[edit]
1980s[edit]
1990s[edit]
2000s[edit]
2010s[edit]
See also[edit]
- BAFTA Award for Best Direction
- Golden Globe Award for Best Director
- Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Director
- Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film
- List of Best Director winners by age
- List of Big Five Academy Award winners and nominees
- List of superlative Academy Award winners and nominees
- List of directors with two or more Academy Awards for Best Director
References[edit]
External links[edit]
- Oscars.org (official Academy site)
- Oscar.com (official ceremony promotional site)
- The Academy Awards Database (official site)
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