The first woman to win an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’
Before the first female director walked on stage to accept her award for ‘Best Director’, only three women had previously been nominated for the honour in the 81-year history of the Academy Award.
Hollywood has been a historical boys’ club, and its sexist cigar-twirling stench pervading the American movie landscape came to a head when an award in existence since 1929 first went to a female director in 2010. In the last decade or so, while there’s been a push for greater female representation in moviemaking in general, the scales remain skewed.
So, who were the three women hovering near the glass ceiling before one finally crashed through to that elusive win? Lina Wertmüller was the first female ‘Best Director’ nominee in 1977 with Seven Beauties, a careful anomaly rather than the floodgates through which more women directors worthy of awards consideration could hitch through. It was 17 years later, in 1994, Jane Campion landed on the nominations list with The Piano, while Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation shout-out was the third instance in 2004.
So, who was the first woman to win ‘Best Director’?
In truth, even when Kathryn Bigelow became the fourth woman nominated for her searing Iraq war bomb disposal fare The Hurt Locker, much of the narrative surrounding her quest to make history was that she was going up against her ex-husband James Cameron, whose sci-fi epic Avatar notched him ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ nominations.
Bigelow’s movie, which starred Jeremy Renner, Guy Pearce, and Anthony Mackie, was also up for ‘Best Picture’, and couldn’t have been more different than Avatar. Yet, the press framed Bigelow’s story within the context of Cameron’s, despite the two having been divorced for almost two decades at that point.
Unfortunate media cycles tacked with shades of sexism aside, Bigelow made history on March 7th, 2010, a day before International Women’s Day celebrations. She landed ‘Best Director’, beating Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Jason Reitman, and Lee Daniels in the process, and also took home ‘Best Picture’ over a varied list of candidates including The Blind Side, District 9, Up in the Air, A Serious Man, and Inglourious Basterds.
Regardless, she courted controversy for not underlining her status as the first female winner in her acceptance speech. Many expected her to use her platform to become a torchbearer rallying against the Academy’s historic imbalances, but she refused the heat, in keeping with her categorical refusal to identify with “woman filmmaker” or “feminist director”.
However, this doesn’t indicate a disdain for female directors or dismissal of the industry road being a tough traversal for female creators. Instead, she’d just love for her gender to be irrelevant in these conversations. “A filmmaker is a filmmaker,” she once stated, “I tend not to look through a lens that is bifurcated in respect to gender or anything”. However, she conceded that if she is seen as a “role model for other women directors to prove that if you’re tenacious enough, you can achieve what you have in your sights, then I’m proud to carry that mantle”.
Since Bigelow’s historic win, more women have found their way into ‘Best Director’ consideration than ever before. Greta Gerwig, Lulu Wang, and Justine Triet were all hotly-tipped contenders to win, but fell short, while Chloé Zhao became the second female winner with her 2021 drama Nomadland. Would they have been in contention for such a major honour without Bigelow’s pioneering win helping Hollywood to (belatedly) change its ways? It’s hard to say, but her place in filmmaking history is vitally important, bifurcated lenses aside.
