Female Directors Shut Out Of This Year’s Oscar Nominations
The Oscar nominations revealed Tuesday did not include any female directors, extending a trend across this season’s awards landscape. It means the modest streak of women winning the Directing Oscar will end at two, after back-to-back wins the past two years with Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) in 2022 and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) in 2021.
This morning, the names called were Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans), Todd Field (Tár) and Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness).
Earlier this season, the mostly apples-to-apples Directors Guild also went with McDonagh, Kwan & Scheinert, Field and Spielberg, but had Top Gun: Maverick‘s Joseph Kosinski rounding out its five. The DGA did nominate four women for First-Time Feature Film award: Alice Diop (Saint Omer), Audrey Diwan (Happening), Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic (Murina) and Charlotte Wells (Aftersun).
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Wells was among the women directors in the mix for nominations today, along with Sarah Polley for Women Talking, which did get a Best Picture nom today as well as one for her Adapted Screenplay. Others that had been tipped for noms: Gina Prince-Bythewood for The Woman King, Chinonye Chukwu for Till and Maria Schrader for She Said. (Prince-Bythewood did pick up a BAFTA nom, and she and Polley did land Critics Choice noms, but that was over 10 nominees, not the Oscars’ five.)
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The Woman King, Till and She Said were shut out altogether by the Oscars today. Aftersun picked up a Best Actor nom for Paul Mescal.
“Once again, Academy voters have shown that they don’t value women’s voices, shutting us out of the Best Director nominations,” Women In Film, Los Angeles said in a statement today. “An Academy Award is more than a gold statue, it’s a career accelerator that can lead to continued work and increased compensation. That’s why WIF will continue to advocate for the work of talented women directors like Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, Maria Schrader’s She Said, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, to be included.”
A total of seven female directors have been Oscar nominated in the award’s history dating to 1927: Champion, Zhao, Emerald Fennell, Greta Gerwig, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola and Lina Wertmüller. Bigelow was the first female winner ever for The Hurt Locker in 2009.