With the Academy Awards, there’s often a question of whether someone’s due. That gets to a new question of how likely it is looking at someone’s career that they would have an Oscar. It’s an interesting challenge.
I’ll try this with actors as well, but right now I’m going to rate how likely it is from their resumes that directors since 1990 have won an Academy Award, rated from one * to *****. One star would mean that they won for the only movie they could realistically win. Two stars means they had at least two movies that could win Best Director. Three stars means that it is completely understandable looking at their work that they won Best Director. Four stars means that you would expect them to have won Best Director. Five stars means that we are dealing with a legend, and it would be suspicious of the Academy to not have awarded this person Best Director.
There is a theoretical zero stars for somebody who wins despite never making a film that would be good enough to be under consideration for Best Director, but that hasn’t happened here.
If somebody won more than once, it would be about how likely I feel their second (or third) Oscar is. This is not a criticism regarding the movie. It’s possible for someone to have only made one movie that was good enough to be in contention for Best Director, but also for that to be the best movie of the year.
Subsequent films count as part of someone’s resume, so there is a going to be a bias against more recent Academy Award winners, who don’t have the advantage of decades of post-Oscar films counting on their behalf.
Best Director
1990s
Kevin Costner is * with his win for Unforgiven. He’s only made three other films, although sequels to Horizon are coming soon. One of his other films was a massive flop, and his other westerns weren’t exactly in the running for Best Director.
Jonathan Demme was *** with his win for Silence of the Lambs. Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married are well-regarded. His concert films got good reviews, although that’s more of a showcase of his range, rather than an explanation for why he won once.
Clint Eastwood’s first Oscar for Unforgiven was ****. It is entirely understandable that the director of American Sniper, Letters From Iwo Jima, Mystic River and The Outlaw Josey Wales has an Academy Award. The guy has directed some good movies.
Stephen Spielberg’s first Oscar for Schindler’s List was *****. He’s acclaimed as one of the best directors ever, so obviously he’s got an Oscar.
Robert Zemeckis’s Oscar for Forrest Gump was ***. It is entirely reasonable for the director of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Castaway and Flight to have an Oscar.
Mel Gibson’s Directing Academy Award for Braveheart was **. He has not been prolific, but his subsequent films are often interesting. The main issue is that there aren’t many of them, but Braveheart wasn’t the only one he could have won for.
Anthony Minghella is ** with his win for the English Patient. He was not very prolific with six feature-length films, although a few do have a decent reputation.
James Cameron’s Oscar was ****. He’s a name director, and the main knock against him is that so many of his films aren’t the type that usually get nominated, rather than any commentary on his talent. Titanic was certainly the type of film Oscars go for.
Stephen Spielberg’s second Oscar was ****. You would expect a director of his caliber to have two Academy Awards.
Sam Mendes is ***, even if he won for his debut. He’s not all that prolific (and two of his biggest films were James Bonds which aren’t really in contention for these types of awards) but he’s got a solid record. His rating may increase with the Beatles saga/
2000s
Steven Soderbergh is ****. Especially considering how prolific he is, you would expect the director who made groundbreaking indie films, got Julia Roberts an Oscar, and averages a film a year to have an Academy Award.
Ron Howard is ***. He is rather prolific, and while the quality is hit and miss, he’s got some good stuff on his resume (Apollo 13, Frost/ Nixon, Rush, Cocoon, Cinderella Man) beyond the film that won Best Picture.
Roman Polanski is ****. It’s sensible that the director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist, some well-regarded British dramas and one of the best-regarded Polish films ever has an Oscar. This is not a comment about his crimes, which are atrocious.
Peter Jackson is ***. He’s a bit odd in that his one Oscarbait vehicle the Lonely Bones flopped, but he has developed a reputation from impressive if Oscar-ineligible documentaries. The Lord of the Rings franchise is also messy in this context. It’s three films for which he was twice nominated, even if it’s seen as one massive project, the only time a film won Best Picture because the series was due.
Clint Eastwood’s second Oscar is ***. It’s reasonable that he’d have two, but not exactly guaranteed from his resume.
Ang Lee’s first Oscar is ****. He’s a well-regarded director with successes in different types of films, including wuxia, domestic drama and epic adventure.
Martin Scorsese’s Oscar exemplifies the *****. He’s arguably the best director ever, even if that didn’t help Hitchcock, Bergman or Kurosawa. It would be a stain on the Academy if he didn’t have a directing Oscar.
The Coen Brothers are another *****. They’re very good and also very prolific. You could easily imagine them winning with Fargo, the True Grit reboot, or one of their Americana stories, rather than the dark and excellent No Country For Old Men.
Danny Boyle is ***. He’s a respected Director with a cult following, but you wouldn’t necessarily bet a lot on the guy whose top films include the Scottish drug drama Trainspotting, the zombie action film 28 Days Later and science-fiction thriller Sunshine to have an Academy Award.
Kathryn Bigelow is ***. She has also raised her profile after the Academy Award with Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit.
2010s
Tom Hooper is **. There is no rush for a streaming service to showcase his oeuvre. Cats was a flop, although a further issue is that he’s not prolific in terms of other work.
Michel Hazanavicius is *. He has mainly made pastiches of classic films, winning for The Artist, the one that really got major attention (though I quite liked the Bond parodies)
Ang Lee’s second Academy Award is **. He’s not very prolific, and he has a mixed record, so his second Oscar is a bit of a surprise in the context of his career, and when you consider directors who don’t have one (Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, etc.)
And now for the period dominated by the three amigos, three Mexican directors who won five Academy Awards for directing in a six year period. Alfonso’s Cuaron’s first Academy Award is ****. He’s not very prolific, but he is a brand director with varied accomplishments, including the best Harry Potter film and a love triangle for mature audiences.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first Academy Award is ***. He’s an unusual director in that he’s only made seven films, but all seem popular with the Oscar crowd.
His second Academy Award is *. It’s weird for a guy with seven films, none as acclaimed as Pulp Fiction, Do the Right Thing or The Dark Knight to have two Academy Awards.
Damien Chazelle’s Academy Award is **. His reputation may change in the coming decades if he makes movies on the level of the post-Oscar films of Scorsese, Spielberg or the Coen brothers.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Academy Award is ****. It helped that his follow-up to The Shape of Water got nominated for Best Picture, and that his next film has won a lot of industry awards for Animation. He is the only one of the three amigos mentioned on this meme of directing styles.
Alfonso Cuaron’s second Academy Award is **. He’s an acclaimed director, but he’s not very prolific, and some of his films aren’t exactly Oscarbait (to be fair, Gravity wasn’t either and he won that one.)
Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award is ****, although it would have been expected for one of his Hollywood releases to be the one that gets him the Oscar (see most of the Oscars from the three amigos, Roman Polanksi, Milos Forman, Hazanavicius and Bernardo Bertolucci) rather than a South Korean drama about the haves and have-nots.
2020s
Chloe Zhao is **. She made two well-regarded independent films, before winning for her third. Her rating could go up significantly if she makes a few decent movies. She’s had a very low profile since The Eternals flopped.
Jane Campion is ***. She’s had some major projects in a long career, although she isn’t very prolific in film, partially she spent the decade+ between Bright Star and Power of the Dog doing the Top of the Lake mini-series, which do have Oscar-level casts and reviews.
The Daniels are *. It is still very weird that Everything Everywhere All At Once won all those Oscars. Glorious, but weird. It’s the first sci-fi film to win Best Picture. It was released early in the year, in contrast to the typical Oscar contender strategy of October or later. I get why it dominated the acting awards. The main characters had clear arcs and layers, while the actors showed additional range with multiple variants. But the directors are quite obscure. It’s their second full film together, after shorts and music videos, and a two-hander with Harry Potter as a farting corpse. Daniel Scheinert also made his own black comedy with a box office of $36,856.
What are they going to do for their third film? And this is where there seems to be little precedent. Typical Best Director (Jane Campion, the three amigos) winners have bigger resumes. Even Damien Chazelle and Chloe Zhao won for their third films.
This is kinda like if the Wachowskis had won Best Director and Best Picture for the Matrix, or if Shyamalan had won it for The Sixth Sense, in terms of the sudden emergence of major new talent, and new ways of telling genre stories. A bad precedent would be Michael Cimino, who followed the Oscar for his second film with one of the most notorious flops in movie history. A good precedent would be Mel Gibson, who hasn’t been prolific but made consistently interesting work as Director.
In contrast, the next year’s winner Christopher Nolan (*****) is a major director who has made many films that people will watch decades from now. He has decades ahead of him, but if he quits filmmaking tomorrow (although I’m really looking forward to his version of the Odyssey) he would maintain his reputation as arguably the major director of the first quarter of the 21st Century.
Best Picture Directors Who Didn’t Win Best Director
Now, I’ll consider the ratings of the people who directed Best Picture winners but didn’t get the Oscar.
John Madden (**) didn’t have many Oscar-worthy films, beyond Shakespeare in Love. Maybe Mrs. Brown.
Ridley Scott (****) is a major director a bit hamstrung by making acclaimed sci-fi films in a genre which is rarely nominated. But add to that Thelma & Louise, American Gangster and The Last Duel. He’s in his 80s but still making good work, so he might win with the one film that pushes him into ***** territory.
Rob Marshall (**) isn’t very prolific, has had mixed reviews, and is known mainly for musicals.
Paul Haggis (*) is more notable as screenwriter than director. He is unlikely to direct many films in the future, given the rape conviction.
Ben Affleck (**) had a couple (literally- it was two) good films on his resume before Argo, and followed it up with the quite-solid Air. He’s in early 50s, so he may have some more good films in him.
Steve McQueen (***) has spent energy on experimental work, and an acclaimed TV mini-series, beyond his five prestige films. His film resume is light, even though his overall talent is impeccable.
Tom McCarthy (**) is not all that prolific, and has been hit & miss. The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win-Win and Stillwater got good notices, even if he’s one of the directors who wins for his most acclaimed film.
Barry Jenkins (**) had only made one film before Moonlight. If Beale Street Could Talk was impressive, but the majority of his follow-up work has been in television and he spent a few years on a Disney prequel. He’s in his early 40s, so this can change quickly.
There were two recent directors who weren’t even nominated for films that won Best Picture. Green Book director Peter Farrely (*) is best known for R-rated comedies he made with his brother. CODA director Sian Hedder (*) has only made two movies to date. So their lack of nominations makes more sense than Oscars would.
Current Nominees…
The race for Best Director seems wide open at the moment, although what’s curious is that these are all first-time nominees. Some of them have more of a track record than others.
Sean Baker (***) has developed a unique brand as an indie director with Tangerines, The Florida Project and Red Rocket.
Brady Corbett (**) has only made three films. He’s younger than me, so I’m sure he’s got quite a few more in him.
James Mangold (***) has been successful in another musical biopic, a historical drama about racing, a western and one of the best superhero films.
Jacques Audiard (***) is a pretty big deal in France. A Prophet has been lists of the best movies of the 21st Century. Rust and Bone got Marion Cotilard an Oscar nomination. Dheepan won the Palme d’Or.
Coralie Fargeat (*) has only made one other film: a French action thriller.
If you enjoyed Thomas Mets’ writing on Best Directors you may like “Top Ten Films of 2024.“
