Oscars Best Director field could be all-male for the second time in three years

Back in 2018, while presenting Best Director alongside Ron Howard at the Golden Globe Awards, Natalie Portman created a meme: “And here are the all-male nominees,” Portman said, pointedly underlining the omission of presumed contenders like Greta Gerwig for “Lady Bird” and Patty Jenkins for “Wonder Woman.”

Speaking a month after the ceremony, Portman said she wanted to bring attention to the disparity in the directors’ field without throwing the male nominees under the bus. “It’s not their fault, and they all made great work. You don’t want to not recognize them,” she said to BuzzFeed. “It’s just, why aren’t we recognizing the people who aren’t part of this exclusive club?”

But, Portman added, her goal was to make clear the obvious. “We have to make it weird for people to walk in a room where everyone’s not in the room,” she said. “If you look around a room and everyone looks like you, get out of that room. Or change that room.”

Judging by the current awards landscape, the room might need another remodel. According to the Gold Derby odds, the 10 most likely Best Director Oscar nominees are all men: Sean Baker (“Anora”), Jacques Audiard (“Emilia Perez”), Steve McQueen (“Blitz”), Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), Edward Berger (“Conclave”), Denis Villeneuve (“Dune: Part Two”), Ridley Scott (“Gladiator II”), RaMell Ross (“Nickel Boys”), Greg Kwedar (“Sing Sing”), and Pedro Almodovar (“The Room Next Door”). The highest-ranked woman is Marielle Heller, who currently sits in 12th place for “Nightbitch.” After Heller, the other female filmmakers on the chart include “Fancy Dance” filmmaker Erica Tremblay (24th place), “The Substance” director Coralie Fargeat (25th place), “All We Imagine As Light” director Payal Kapadia (30th place), and “Babygirl” filmmaker Halina Reijn (32nd place). 

The dearth of top female contenders is a disappointment, particularly just one year after “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker Justine Triet were among the top picks for Best Director – with Triet ultimately landing a nomination (and Gerwig becoming a widely discussed Best Director snub). 

The Oscars are indeed the ostensible end of the line in terms of the film industry, and the Academy is not responsible as a group for greenlighting projects directed by women. But the Academy Awards’ history of rewarding female filmmakers is so poor as to be disgraceful. To recap: Only eight women have ever received an Oscar nomination for Best Director, with Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”), Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”), and Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) as the only three winners in history. (Campion is the only woman ever nominated twice for Best Director; she was first nominated in 1994 for “The Piano.”) Of the nine total nominations, five have come in the last six years: Gerwig (for “Lady Bird” in 2018), Zhao (2021), Emerald Fennell (for “Promising Young Woman” in 2021), Campion (2022), and Triet (2024). But several acclaimed female filmmakers are still fighting for their first Best Director nomination, including Sarah Polley, who was snubbed in 2023 for “Women Talking,” one of the year’s Best Picture nominees. (Polley won Best Adapted Screenplay for the film.)

“I think it’s about big systemic change, not performative gestures,” Polley told Vogue in 2023 after the nominations were announced. “Over the last few years, I’ve seen some really good gestures—that’s better than nothing, but it’s not getting to the root of the problem. When you look at a movie like ‘Till,’ ‘Saint Omer,’ or ‘The Woman King’ [all of which were directed by women], it’s not like the work isn’t there.”

That’s true again this year, the first wide-open awards race we’ve seen in quite some time. There is little consensus among the top contenders for Best Picture and Best Director, but few – including this writer – have shown a willingness to predict Heller, Tremblay, Fargeat, Kapadia, or Reijn in the Best Director race. Not that it would be hard to make a case for any of these filmmakers to land a nomination. Heller is a respected veteran whose previous films received Oscar attention for actors Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) and Tom Hanks (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”); her new film “Nightbitch” stars Amy Adams as an overworked mother who slowly begins to suspect she’s turning into a dog. While the initial trailer left many online howling, the film was well-received at the Toronto International Film Festival and could land Adams among this year’s Best Actress nominees. 

With “The Substance,” Fargeat has created the gonzo body horror breakout of the season, a film that won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness audience award. Star Demi Moore is a darkhorse contender for Best Actress recognition (it feels like she just needs a nomination from one major organization – the Golden Globes? The Critics Choice Awards? – to get herself firmly into the race). 

Reijn, whose 2022 film “Bodies Bodies Bodies” has Gen Z approval, feels most Triet-like in that she’s directed an adult thriller that recalls the kind of dramas adults used to love in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She’s been praised by Kidman – who has famously worked with some of the industry’s top filmmakers, including this year’s Best Director nominees Yorgos Lantihmos and Jonathan Glazer – as perhaps the only person who could’ve made “Babygirl.”

“It’s told by a woman through her gaze… and that’s to me what made it so unique was that suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material and it was very deep to share those things and very freeing,” Kidman said of the erotic thriller when it premiered at Venice.

These films are the kind of bold, auteur-minded features that usually get awards prognosticators excited – particularly since the directors’ branch is small in number, meaning strong passion often trumps mass support. (This is perhaps why Gerwig missed this year: She was likely not widely considered as a passion pick, unlike Triet. This is an issue that goes beyond gender, of course, as it seems strongly possible Villeneuve was snubbed for 2021’s “Dune” due to a similar lack of devotion.) Is it so hard to believe Fargeat or Reijn could make it into the Best Director field because the enthusiasm for their work is small but mighty? No disrespect to them, but should Almodovar or Ross — two filmmakers with borderline Best Picture contenders — be taken so much more seriously as legitimate options than these women? History suggests maybe so, but past performance does not guarantee future results.

“I think it’s not just about representation—it’s about acknowledgment,” Polley said in 2023, the last time the academy nominated five men for Best Director. “It’s about whether we’re ignoring it or not.” So far, we’re ignoring it. But there’s still plenty of time to pay attention.