The Oscars are the gold standard for people who care more about gold than standards. Often, Best Picture winners are inferior to other films made that year, enchanting and subtitled international films are disregarded because Academy members can’t read, and box office darlings are dismissed because the point of movies is apparently not for people to like them. In a just world, the Oscars would be selected retroactively after a decade and adjudicated by the first thirty people you find on the street. We don’t live there.
Here are ten women directors who should’ve been nominated and somehow weren’t. This list even accounts for regular Oscar injustices, meaning that groundbreaking pieces like Věra Chytilová’s Daisies or Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 are absent because the Academy’s only New Wave-esque director nod was Truffaut for Day for Night—the Academy will crawl through broken glass for Movies-About-Movies. Penny Marshall will be disregarded here with the same injustice Harold Ramis was. Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy are buried for unacceptable, violent portrayals of women peeing. Here’s the list.
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10 Julie Dash for Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Nominated for Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize, Daughters of the Dust was the first film directed by a Black woman to have a U.S. theatrical distribution. It’s a deeply spiritual look at three generations of Gullah women living on a Georgian island in the early 20th century—but more than anything, it’s a thesis that love is empathy to the extreme of feeling another’s pain, making the horrors these women have to endure onscreen not trauma porn but a love letter from Dash to Black women living in the United States. Just as A Raisin in the Sun could only be the first onstage due to its magnificence, Dust could only break on and offscreen barriers with its ingenuity and poetry.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
9 The Wachowskis for The Matrix (1999)
Warner Bros.
While their cyberpunk spectacle won four Oscars for Visual Effects, Editing, and both Sound categories, it was disregarded in every other capacity. Today, The Matrix is one of the most multifaceted texts in contemporary cinema, recognized canonically as a trans and anti-capitalist allegory — and incorrectly as whatever Redditors think red pills mean. While Lana and Lilly Wachowski hadn’t yet come out as trans in time for the Oscars ceremony, it should’ve been recorded as a clairvoyant certainty that the creators of this celebrated masterpiece were women, as they received no Directing nominations.
8 Mary Harron for American Psycho (2000)
While Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Psycho all received plenty of Oscar nominations, this outstanding satire that allowed viewers to watch Jared Leto get gnocchi’d with an axe got snubbed. American Psycho is a hilarious and disturbing look at the brutality of Wall Street’s evils through a much more identifiable unkindness: killing. Its ambiguity, its directness, its narcissistic narrator all add up to a feeling that the new Willy Loman is the man who killed off the old Willy Loman. What clearly separated it was that it was written and directed by women, demoting this phenomenal thriller into a polarizing jab at masculinity—which should have earned Mary Harron a Best Director nomination.
7 Mira Nair for Monsoon Wedding (2001)
In many ways, it makes sense for Indian filmmaking to never have caught on with the Academy, given the Academy’s disdain for the commercially accessible storyline and Bollywood’s adoration for it. But Monsoon Wedding is a collaborative effort between India, the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany, reflected in its heretical demands of accountability against a tradition of bystanding; Monsoon was right up the Academy’s alley—Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! even being nominated for International Feature twelve years prior. As Nair was praised worldwide for creating a holistically Indian film beloved by Western art critics, even winning the Golden Lion at Venice, the Oscars felt her achievement wasn’t monumental enough to justify a nod.
6 Niki Caro for Whale Rider (2002)
At thirteen, Keisha Castle-Hughes became the then youngest actor ever nominated for Best Actress for her gut-wrenching performance in Whale Rider. Roger Ebert recognized the film on his Top 10 of the Year list, calling it, “fresh, observant, tough” and “genius.” Caro was one of the few to put New Zealand on the international cinematic map since The Piano did in 1993, but the Academy was focused on the other Kiwi director shocking the world: Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As the Academy likes to annually acknowledge one country’s foreigner at a time due to its binding Exclusion Acts, Caro and Frodo weren’t allowed to share the spotlight and this mesmerizing and unapologetically indigenous film got Boromir’d before it could get its fair praises.
5 Dee Rees for Mudbound (2017)
If you’re looking to lie down on the floor for a minute: in 2017, Dee Rees became the first Black woman nominated for Adapted Screenplay and Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated for Cinematography. Mudbound is a spellbinding achievement nominated for four Oscars total, showcasing the immense racial differences of returning WW2 vets’ experiences. It’s gruesome, unafraid, painful to endure, and has a beautiful love story — everything the Academy will rip out their seats for in a war movie. For its success at converting Oscarbait into bona fide quality, the fact that the Academy instead nominated two other WW2 films for Best Picture (Dunkirk and Darkest Hour) among a whopping seven other films revealed that the topic wasn’t out of style, but this new and acclaimed look at Black soldiers was to be dismissed for more palatable traditions.
4 Lynne Ramsay for You Were Never Really Here (2017)
To be clear, any Lynne Ramsay movie could be here—Ramsay is one of the most talented geniuses to ever fiddle with a lens. But You Were Never Really Here is on a very short list of the greatest achievements in modern cinema, closely tied to Parasite, Phantom Thread, The Social Network, Uncut Gems, and another film mentioned below. You Were Never Really Here may well be at the top of that list. In 2017, its screenplay won at Cannes alongside Joaquin Phoenix’s performance, and then suddenly the movie disappeared off the face of the earth. You rarely if ever saw marketing for its brutal portrayal of PTSD and child trafficking. But if you haven’t seen the film at all, as clearly Academy voters did not, this is your sign to go discover one of the greatest movies made since Mank hated Hearst.
3 Lulu Wang for The Farewell (2019)
For many Americans, Chinese cinema has long revolved around kung fu—the closest geographic comparison in dramatic filmmaking being Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai or South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. For Lulu Wang to bring a Chinese-American character to China was for her to bring the audience in tow, the West largely alien to modern PRC customs and experiences. The A24 film was acclaimed with a 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating, winning Awkwafina a deserved Golden Globe for her bewitching performance (revolving around her using her actual cadence). To claim that the Oscars dismissed the film as a political gesture against China doesn’t hold water given their decorations for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland the very next year—this film broke the tiny, new Iron Curtain between Chinese and American dramas. The AFI, the Globes, the Spirit Awards, the National Board of Review—every major indicator of an imminent Oscar darling celebrated The Farewell, but ultimately the Academy felt Wang didn’t deserve their attention.
2 Céline Sciamma for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
This was the aforementioned movie also on the list of modern marvels. Sciamma takes a contemporary subgenre that has already shown symptoms of repetitiveness — the historical, gay romance — and breathes so much soft life into it that it actually ignites. Portrait of a Lady on Fire centers 18th century French folks making art and being gay, the PB&J of modern times, and sculpts a world so distinctly feminine and secluded that the two hours you spend there are more of a furlough than an exploration. The masterwork, like You Were Never Really Here, won for its screenplay at Cannes and was up for the Palme d’Or—thus beginning its regular treat of losing to Parasite. France chose Les Misérables over it for their International Feature contender, which was understandable given Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes, an arbitrary step over Portrait’s Queer Palm. Ultimately, Portrait’s folly was that it was one of the greatest films in modern history pitted against its beloved twin brother, but for it to be disregarded in the Directing category is one of the repeated signals that the Oscars truly don’t know what they’re doing.
1 Janicza Bravo for Zola (2021)
This final choice is a resigned premonition that the Oscars will soon not nominate one of the most outstanding directed movies of the year. As maybe the first film adapted from a Twitter thread, Zola follows a Detroit dancer taking a trip to Florida for a chance at a miniature fortune—as disputed truth becomes more thrilling than perfected fiction. But what now seems to get disregarded as a novelty gag, making a movie from Twitter, undermines that Janicza Bravo’s direction here is some of the most daring in recent history, is absolutely brilliant and innovative in its integration of social media sights and sounds (something a prior half-generation of filmmaking whiffed at recreating time and again due to social media being their learned language and Bravo having fluency), and is didactic in its goals and executions: it’s about laughing at ridiculous and human behaviors in their Chekhovian self-centeredness, it’s about the unflinching validation of sex work as a responsible and lucrative profession especially when performed by responsible and lucrative professionals, and it’s about the appropriation of Black culture stemming from an incorrect assumption that financial insecurity means filthy means disenfrachisement. Zola’s magic is in how it takes a real story from the gutters of working people’s own creative realm and promotes it into a cinematic fairytale while maintaining that the excellence of the story is not marred by its genesis but founded by it—and like most great movies, will live much longer than handheld totems will.
