Who was the first filmmaker to win back-to-back Oscars for ‘Best Director?’
Only 21 filmmakers have ever won more than one Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, and some of the all-time greats didn’t earn any Oscars for their contributions behind the camera.
Stanley Kubrick’s only prize came for the groundbreaking and pioneering visual effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Alfred Hitchcock didn’t win anything despite being one of the most influential figures in cinema history. Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Howard Hawks, and Ingmar Bergman are among the other icons who never sniffed a ‘Best Director’ prize, so maybe it’s not the be-all and end-all for a career.
Of those 21 auteurs with multiple ‘Best Director’ wins to their name, only three of them have been awarded more than two. The legendary pair of Frank Capra and William Wyler are the sole members of the three-timers club, and it’ll be a long time before anyone eclipses John Ford’s record of four statues, if it even happens at all.
The Oscars have been running for almost a century, and relative to the number of nominees and winners, it goes without saying that only the best of the best can notch more than one gong. What’s even rarer is doing it in consecutive years, something that’s only happened three times, dating back to the first edition of Hollywood’s showcase ceremony in 1929.
The most recent entrant into such rarefied air was Alejandro G Iñárritu, who pulled off the first back-to-back triumphs in more than 60 years when he claimed ‘Best Director’ for Birdman at the 2014 Oscars before repeating his triumph the following year when The Revenant took home the top prize dished out to the industry’s most venerated megaphone wielders.
Strangely, the other two back-to-back ‘Best Director’ winners had occurred less than a decade apart, creating the false impression that it would become a regular thing. In another curious twist, despite the trio winning consecutive directorial prizes, only one of those films was also named ‘Best Picture’.
Iñárritu’s Birdman took top honours before The Revenant was beaten by Spotlight, which was the opposite of what happened to Joseph L Mankiewicz. He won ‘Best Director’ for 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives but missed out on ‘Best Picture’ to All the King’s Men, only to secure the double 12 months later with seminal All About Eve.
In fact, not only did he win back-to-back directorial Oscars, but he also became the first person to win two writing prizes in consecutive years when A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve scooped ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Four Oscars in two years isn’t a bad return, even if he wasn’t the first to etch their name into the directorial history books.
Unsurprisingly, considering he’s won more of them than anybody else, that honour belongs to John Ford. He won the second of his Oscars quartet for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and repeated it the next year with How Green Was My Valley, which was his third consecutive nomination after John Wayne’s star-making Stagecoach had gotten him on the shortlist in 1939.
Inadvertently laying down a marker for the two filmmakers who followed in his footsteps, though, The Grapes of Wrath missed out on ‘Best Picture’ to Hitchcock’s Rebecca before How Green Was My Valley did the double.
Who won the most consecutive Oscars?
Much like the person with the most ‘Best Director’ Oscars being the first to win in back-to-back years shouldn’t come as a surprise, the person with the most Oscar wins in history also holds the distinction of the most consecutive victories.
It’s nigh-on impossible to imagine anybody replicating it in the modern age when there’s so much competition in every category, and even now, it boggles the mind that Walt Disney conspired to win at least one of his Oscars every year between 1932 and 1939.
The ‘Mouse House’ founder’s eight in a row came from a combined total of 15 nominations throughout that period, and every single one of them was for ‘Best Short Subject (Cartoon)’, the race he inevitably dominated as the most iconic figure in the history of animation.
Winning two Oscars in successive years is difficult enough, but eight years on the spin? That’s madness and an obstacle that feels like it’ll remain insurmountable forever.
