BEST DIRECTOR
Multiple Wins
4
John Ford
3
Frank Capra
William Wyler
2
Ang Lee
Frank Borzage
Alfonso Cuarón
Clint Eastwood
Miloš Forman
Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Elia Kazan
David Lean
Frank Lloyd
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Leo McCarey
Lewis Milestone
Steven Spielberg
George Stevens
Oliver Stone
Billy Wilder
Robert Wise
Fred Zinnemann
Three or more nominations Director
12
William Wyler
9
Martin Scorsese
Steven Spielberg
8
Billy Wilder
7
Woody Allen
David Lean
Fred Zinnemann
6
Clarence Brown
Frank Capra
5
Robert Altman
George Cukor
John Ford
Alfred Hitchcock
John Huston
Elia Kazan
Frank Lloyd
George Stevens
King Vidor
4
Francis Ford Coppola
Michael Curtiz
Clint Eastwood
Federico Fellini
Stanley Kubrick
Sidney Lumet
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Mike Nichols
Peter Weir
3
Paul Thomas Anderson
Ingmar Bergman
Richard Brooks
Coen brothers
Stephen Daldry
David Fincher
Miloš Forman
Bob Fosse
Alejandro González Iñárritu
James Ivory
Norman Jewison
Stanley Kramer
Ang Lee
Ernst Lubitsch
David Lynch
Leo McCarey
Lewis Milestone
Alexander Payne
Arthur Penn
Roman Polanski
Sydney Pollack
Carol Reed
David O. Russell
John Schlesinger
Ridley Scott
Oliver Stone
Quentin Tarantino
William A. Wellman
Robert Wise
Sam Wood
Age superlatives
Record Director Film Age Ref.
Oldest winner Clint Eastwood Million Dollar Baby 74 [108]
Oldest nominee John Huston Prizzi’s Honor 79 [108]
Youngest winner Damien Chazelle La La Land 32 [108]
Youngest nominee John Singleton Boyz n the Hood 24 [108]
Diversity of nominees/winners
Since its inception, there have been 467 nominations for the award and it has been given to 74 directors or directing teams.
Six black directors have been nominated:
(John Singleton, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele and Spike Lee) a total of six times in this category, and none have won the award.
Seven female directors have been nominated:
(Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Emerald Fennell and Chloé Zhao) a total of eight times in the category.
Three have won the award.
Nine Asian directors have been nominated:
(Hiroshi Teshigahara, Akira Kurosawa, M. Night Shyamalan, Ang Lee, Bong Joon-ho, Lee Isaac Chung, Chloé Zhao, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Daniel Kwan) a total of eleven times in the category, with five wins total.
Five Latin American directors have been nominated:
(Héctor Babenco, Fernando Meirelles, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro) a total of eight times in the category, with five wins total.
Records
John Ford has received the most awards with four.
William Wyler was nominated on 12 occasions, more than any other individual, including a record four times in a row.
Clarence Brown received the most nominations (6) without win
Damien Chazelle became the youngest director in history to receive this award, at the age of 32 for his work on La La Land.
John Singleton became the youngest and first black director to be nominated for this award, at age 24 for Boyz n the Hood.
Three directing teams have shared the award;
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story in 1961;
Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men in 2007;
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022.
Only five times in history have director-collaborators been nominated for award:
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961), Warren Beatty and Buck Henry for Heaven Can Wait (1978), Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men (2007) and True Grit (2010), and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).
Debut:
Only six times in history did directors win the award for their feature film debut:
Delbert Mann for Marty (1955)
Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961)
Robert Redford for Ordinary People (1980)
James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment (1983)
Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves
Sam Mendes for American Beauty (1999).
Jerome Robbins is the only winner in this category that only directed one feature film his entire life.
The Coen Brothers are the only siblings to have won the award.
Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to have won the award for The Hurt Locker.
Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Trilogy is the only director to be nominated for each film of a trilogy, winning one for the sequel.
John Ford (1940–1941), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1949–1950), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (2014–2015) are the only three directors to have won two years consecutively for this category.
Ang Lee is the first Asian director to have won the award for Brokeback Mountain. He won again for Life of Pi.
Alfonso Cuarón became the first Mexican director (and Latin American) to have won the award for Gravity. He won again for Roma.
Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to have won the award for Nomadland.
Chaplin
The Circus originally received a nomination for Best Director (Comedy Picture), as well as nominations for Best Actor and Best Writing (Original Story), all for Charles Chaplin. However, the Academy subsequently decided to remove Chaplin’s name from the competitive award categories and instead to confer upon him a Special Award “for acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus”.
Chilton, Martin (May 16, 2016). “The first Oscars: what happened in 1929”. The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on May 19, 2016.
The 2nd Academy Awards is the only occasion where there were no official nominees.
Subsequent research by AMPAS: a list of unofficial or de facto nominees, based on records of which films were evaluated by the judges.
Michael Curtiz was not on the original ballot of nominees. However, after the year prior with Bette Davis’s omission for Of Human Bondage, the resulting furor led to a write-in campaign determined to secure her a nomination. The Academy relaxed their rules and allowed her performance to be amongst the competition.
They permitted this once more, prompting further submissions: Curtiz; Paul Muni for Black Fury; and several other categories, including Hal Mohr for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Mohr became the only person to win an Oscar as a result of this process. The Academy discontinued this option from the next ceremony forward to prevent any recurrence.
Eligibility
The eligibility period for the 93rd ceremony was extended through to February 28, 2021, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
