While it's still unclear who will win the most awards at the 95th Academy Awards, one thing is certain: a man will (once again) win the Best Director category. Where are the women?
Steven Spielberg won two Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for “Schindler's List” in 1994.
At the 2018 Golden Globes, Natalie Portman caused a laugh when she introduced the nominees for Best Director: “Here are the all-male nominees,” she quipped quizzically at the time, before reading out the list of filmmakers, who were nominated for the prestigious award. The list included well-known names such as Martin McDonagh, who was nominated for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing” and Steven Spielberg, who was on the list for “The Post”.
At this year's Oscars, Portsman's moderation could be repeated verbatim: Both McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) and Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”) are (again) among the nominees in the category “Best Director”.
The nominees also include the directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Todd Field (“Tàr”) and Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”) . Men without exception.
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Although in the past two years Chloé Zhao 2021 for “Nomadland” and Jane Campion 2022 for “The Power of the Dog” were awarded in the directing category, the top prize remains a male domain. This year was not even a woman shortlisted.
Jane Campion won the 2022 award in the Best category Director”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the prize, was therefore criticized even before the award ceremony. There have been countless protests against the decision not to nominate women.
“Once again, Academy voters have shown they don't value women's voices by excluding us from the Best Director nominations. An Oscar is more than a golden statue, it's a career accelerator leading to more work and higher salaries,” said a statement from the Hollywood lobby organization “Women in Film”.
The organization pointed to several talented female directors who unfairly missed out on the 2023 nomination, including Sarah Polley (“The Debate”), Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”), Maria Schrader (“She Said”) ), Chinonye Chukwu (“Till”) and Charlotte Wells (“Aftersun”).
In the nearly 100-year history of the Oscars, only seven women have been nominated for Best Director; three of them won the award. The first woman was Kathryn Bigelow. She received an award in 2010 for her film “The Hurt Locker”.
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Oscars mostly go to American men
The controversy prompted DW data analysis team to delve deeper into the topic  ;and to examine the predominant characteristics of the filmmakers (and women) who have won the directing Oscar throughout history.
The result of the research: three out of four nominees come from the USA, 97% are male. In addition, more than a quarter of the directors nominated in the story have won more than once in this category. 96% of winning films are dramas (although some are genre-bending).
Gabriel Rossman, a professor of sociology at UCLA, is not surprised by these statistics. The data basically represented the typical Hollywood director, he said.
To change that, the Academy actually created the Gold Fellowship, a scholarship program for female filmmakers.
Chloe Zhao won an Oscar for Best Director in 2021
Yet despite the best efforts, Rossman remains critical of the Academy's role.
The Oscars were originally designed for a wide audience, he says. However, they are increasingly becoming something “of interest only to an insider community”. The ratings speak volumes. Over the past decade, the Oscars have seen a sharp downward trend in viewership.
The 2021 awards hit an all-time low of 10.4 million US viewers. Last year viewers increased slightly to 15.4 million. But the ceremony, which reached a mass audience, was a long time ago. In 2014, more than 40 million viewers in the US turned on their TVs to watch live.
Nominations unevenly distributed
Using the publicly available Academy Awards database, DW's data analysis team also found that the nominations for best director are unevenly distributed. Only a selected group of filmmakers will be awarded.
A fifth of all directors in the nominee club have been nominated at least three times. Half of all nominations went to them.
The director with the most nominations of all time is William Wyler (“Ben-Hur”, 1960). He received 12 nominations, followed by Martin Scorsese and Billy Wilder, both of whom were nominated eight times. Many other filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, came up with seven nominations.
Oscar nominations are of great importance for the success of films and box office results, as researchers from the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg have discovered. The audience uses the nominations as a guide when going to the cinema.
According to Rossman, there are two possible reasons for the unequal distribution: “One explanation is that these top directors are simply the most talented. That would mean: even if “If you were to allocate all the resources haphazardly they would still make the best films. I think there's a little bit to that, but not a lot. The main reason is probably that these top directors get access to the best projects because they are the most famous.”