Below are the 75 different directors or directing teams who have won the Academy Award for Best Director as of 2024. While winning the award is not an assurance that they are a great director, it is a good indicator. To find out more about every Oscar-winning director on this list just click their picture.
Oscar for Best Director Winners
The Academy Awards
The Academy Awards! Is there anything as contentious amongst film fans? Some see them as a farcical self-adoring love-in, made by and for Hollywood elites, which only celebrates movies about the power of Hollywood, conventionality and box office returns. Others see it as a celebration of cinema as an art form and watch with bated breath (Oscar Race?) as every award winner is announced across the awards season, wondering how it will affect the chances of their favourite film’s performance at the ceremony.
In a way, it’s both. Every industry has its end-of-year awards, from watch sellers to briefcase purveyors. The only difference between them and the Oscars is that the general public doesn’t care about the insides of their professions. Look online, there are hordes of people who only consider a movie good if it succeeds at the box office. People care about movie making in a way they do not care about any other job industry. It’s paradoxical, but it can also be fun.
Winning an Academy Award is a dream for any filmmaker, but the award’s impact on a career can vary greatly. Some who win the award are enshrined in immortality, as with John Ford‘s four wins for Best Director, while others enjoy barely a boost to their careers, as with Delbert Mann‘s fate after Marty.
But it’s nonetheless a good way to look at a year in filmmaking, as the nominees for the Best Director award often reveal underlying facts about the film industry at large.
Click through the names above and explore each winner – what does their win say about the film industry (If anything)? Winning the award ensures you’ll always at least be a trivia question in a pub quiz, but it also means your filmography is worth some exploration. So click around the directors and learn about their themes, their best films and a little background on them.
Eventually, I aim to write hypothetical enquiries into each year’s nominees for Best Director – I’ve already done one for Carol Reed and the 1968 ceremony – but that’ll take time. I also intend to list all the nominees of the awards below for each year. But that’d mean creating a page for directors like Herbert Brenon or Scott Hicks, and while I hope to eventually make one for them – there are some very notable names we’re still missing. So, I prefer to focus on those.
Bronze Screen Dream 