For better or worse (which at this time of year, as the punditry reaches its hyperbolic event horizon, usually feels like worse) an Academy Award is the highest honor anyone in the film industry can receive. But of course, like any large organization—even one that wasn’t, as of 2012, reportedly 94% white, 77% male and 86% over the age of 50—the AMPAS gets things wrong (shocking, we know). Sometimes due to the politicking of insiders, sometimes because the wind shifts, and yes, sometimes because of plain old-fashioned bias, the membership votes to award the lesser film, or the lesser performance, or the lesser accomplishment, while the greater one stays seated after the envelope is opened—if they’re there at all.
You’ve seen it happen time and time again: it’s bad enough for an actor, but while theirs is the most competitive and largest block, there are four acting categories each time, divided by gender, and an actor can technically appear in several films in a single year. Directors, on the other hand, often spend at least a couple of years attached to a single project (unless they’re Woody Allen), so their chance to hop on the Best Director carousel, which only seats five anyway, comes by much less often. Which makes miscarriages of justice in this arena both more inevitable and more galling.
In part this is down to the statistical likelihood that a Best Picture winner will also take Best Director (as indeed feels logical—always a bit strange that the director of the Best Picture doesn’t get to take the podium for that award unless he or she is also a producer) as has happened in 63 out of the 85 cases to date. And we all know how notoriously fickle the Best Picture slot can be (our evidently “controversial” ranking of the 85 Best Picture winners is here). Taking all of these factors into consideration, it’s not surprising that some of the biggest directors in film history have come away empty handed. So we wanted to show them a little love.
A word or two on who we’re covering: this is solely about the Best Directing Oscar so while some of the below may have been awarded in other areas like screenplay or even as a producer, or received Lifetime Achievement placebos, they’ve never been named Best Director. And we decided to confine ourselves to directors for whom winning in the future is either impossible, or, as in the case of Jean-Luc Godard, highly improbable (he’d likely not accept anyway!). So we won’t be featuring David Lynch (3 directing nominations, no wins), Christopher Nolan (0 directing nominations), David Fincher (2 nominations), Jane Campion (1 nom), Terry Gilliam (0 noms), Terrence Malick, (2 noms), Darren Aronofsky (1 nom), Spike Lee (0 noms), Paul Thomas Anderson (1 nom), David Cronenberg (0 noms) and so on, as least some of whom will surely pick up a Directing statue in future years. Our 20 picks below are all people for whom the book on that is firmly closed—as surprising, baffling or saddening as that might be.
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)
Directing Nominations: “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) and “Barry Lyndon” (1975)
Other Oscar History: All of the above, bar “2001,” received Best Picture nominations, and Kubrick was nominated for co-writing the screenplays for all four plus 1987’s “Full Metal Jacket.” Kubrick’s sole Oscar win was for Best Visual Effects for “2001,” though he wasn’t present at the awards ceremony.
What Should They Have Won For? Tough one. Almost any of the above would have been good choices, along with “The Shining,” though that, as a horror flick, was never likely to be in the Academy’s wheelhouse. But if we had to pick just one, let’s go for “2001,” which in a career that made a lot of cinematic history, made the most. It’s Kubrick’s most experimental, most meticulous and most groundbreaking picture, and the sort of thing that a director deserves to be recognized for. It’s the film that, even with several close rivals, will be the one that he’s remembered for, and certainly feels like the one that should have won him the Oscar.
Alfred Hitchock (1899-1980)
Directing Nominations: “Rebecca” (1940), “Lifeboat” (1944), “Spellbound” (1945), “Rear Window” (1954) and “Psycho” (1960)
Other Oscar History: Hitchcock is pretty much the corpulent, cigar-chomping poster boy for this list. It’s almost inconceivable that someone who bestrode Hollywood in such a colossal way for so long never won Best Director. Only one of his films won Best Picture: “Rebecca,” (1941) and he lost the Director gong that year to John Ford for “The Grapes of Wrath.” The Academy itself seemed a bit “oh crap what’ve we done?” about it all, giving Hitch the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968. It is an honorary Oscar (confusingly not shaped like an Oscar), but even that is awarded to “creative producers” rather than in recognition of directing achievement.
What Should They Have Won For: Sheesh, pick a card. Of his nominations, he should have won for either “Rear Window” or “Psycho,” both brilliant thrillers that in their own way were experimental. But in hindsight, the film he should have won for didn’t even get a nomination (it flopped on initial release): “Vertigo.” It’s a dizzying, daring, dark tour de force of personal passion and perversity wrapped up in incredible craft (not to mention it has the best legacy of any Hitchcock film, replacing “Citizen Kane” on the Sight & Sound greatest of all time list). And if that would have been too hard a sell, then come on, I mean, “North by Northwest” pretty much launched the action/adventure genre with seemingly effortless charm, and “Notorious” too, comes dangerously close to perfection.
Orson Welles (1915-1985)
Directing Nominations: “Citizen Kane” (1941)
Other Oscar History: Welles had two other nods for “Citizen Kane,” one for acting, and one for co-writing the script with Herman Mankiewicz—they won in the latter category, though there was later controversy over who wrote what. Neither were at the ceremony. The same was true in 1971 when Welles was given an Honorary Award by the Academy.
What Should They Have Won For? it would be tough to argue for anything but “Citizen Kane,” given Welles’ relatively brief completed filmography, and that his debut literally changed the face of cinema forever. “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Touch Of Evil” would both come close, had they been released in their originally intended versions, but both were tinkered with to the extent that an Oscar for Welles would have sent the wrong message. But even so, it’s probably Kane that’s most deserving: the film doesn’t look or sound like anything else that was being made around the time, and might be as influential as any movie ever made.