Frank Capra — 1939
You Can’t Take it With You (1938)
We’ve officially reached the stretch of Hollywood history where we’re going to see a lot of the same names over and over again. This was Frank Capra’s third win; he beat Norman Taurog for Boys Town, King Vidor for The Citadel, and a double shot of Michael Curtiz, who lost for both Angels With Dirty Faces and Four Daughters. You Can’t Take it With You, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, is a zany romp with lots of colorful characters—a very entertaining picture.
Leo McCarey — 1938
The Awful Truth (1937)
I was perhaps a little dismissive of McCarey’s Going My Way win earlier on this list, so I take it all back for this delightful screwball comedy starring Irene Dunn, Cary Grant, and Ralph Bellamy. The screwball comedy is one of the great gifts that 1930s Hollywood gave us, but that genre didn’t win too many awards. Indeed, best picture this year went to the very serious biopic The Life of Emile Zola, ostensibly about the Dreyfus affair—though producers of the period were too timid to mention that the incident at the heart of the story was driven by antisemitism.
Frank Capra — 1937
Mr. Deeds Comes to Town (1936)
Keep your Frank Capra pictures straight. Mr. Smith is the one who goes to Washington, while it’s Mr. Deeds who comes to town. Both costar Jean Arthur, and like many Capra pictures, both are brimming with an all-American optimism that overcomes all obstacles with a perfect ending. This film was later remade as Mr. Deeds with Adam Sandler, which is exciting because I’ve been looking for an excuse to mention the Sandman alongside all these Academy Award–winning directors. Best picture this year, however, went to The Great Ziegfeld.
John Ford — 1936
The Informer (1935)
Poor Victor McLaughlin, torn apart by guilt, looking for redemption on the floor of a church. It’s one of the most Irish moments in cinema, and it got John Ford his first of four best-director Oscars. Ford beat out Frank Lloyd, whose Mutiny on the Bounty won best picture. (Lloyd had already won twice.) In an anomaly, Ford also beat Michael Curtiz, who was a write-in candidate for the Errol Flynn picture Captain Blood. For a very brief period, the Academy allowed last-minute write-ins, but this was the only time it happened in this category.
Frank Capra — 1935
It Happened One Night (1934)
It Happened One Night was the first movie to win the “big five” at the Oscars: best picture, director, screenplay (Robert Riskin), best actor (Clark Gable), and best actress (Claudette Colbert). Is it really that good? Yes. It’s fantastic, and it created a template that romantic comedies and road pictures still follow. This year only saw three nominees in the best-director category. Capra beat out Victor Schertzinger for the opera-set comedy One Night of Love, but also W.S. Van Dyke for the champagne-soaked sleuthing comedy The Thin Man, which brought early Hollywood its best dog costar in Skippy.
Frank Lloyd — 1934
Cavalcade (1933)
At the sixth Academy Awards, there were three nominees for best director: Frank Lloyd for Cavalcade, Frank Capra for Lady for a Day, and George Cukor for Little Women. When Will Rogers opened the envelope for this category, the folksy comedian said, “Come up and get it, Frank!”—so Frank Capra went up to the podium. Whoopsie! It was Frank Lloyd who actually won. (To save face, Rogers called George Cukor up, too.) Cavalcade also won best picture, only the second time the prizes went to the same film and director.
Frank Borzage — 1932
Bad Girl (1931)
I didn’t screw up the years here—in the early days, Oscar qualification dates were summer-to-summer of different years, and the Cavalcade year had a 17-month window to get the awards to sync up better to the calendar. Borzage beat our friend King Vidor, who directed The Champ, and Josef von Sternberg, who directed Shanghai Express. Best picture, though, went to Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford. Bad Girl, shot at what today is called Kaufman-Astoria Studio in Queens, New York, was a “pre-code” drama, meaning it dealt in more realistic topics, like premarital sex—which would soon vanish from Hollywood product for several decades.
Norman Taurog — 1931
Skippy (1931)
This comedy about a troublesome tyke played by Jackie Coogan was based on a popular comic strip from the era, and yes, it was the inspiration for Skippy peanut butter. Joseph L. Rosenfeld, a California-based food entrepreneur, made adjustments to a cooking and packaging formula he’d already created for Peter Pan peanut butter. He did not have the rights to either name, but things were different back then. Best picture this year did not go to Skippy, however. It went to Cimarron, which is often listed as one of the worst winners of the top Oscar prize.
Lewis Milestone — 1930
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Lewis Milestone, born Leib Mistein in modern-day Moldova, was the first director to win this award twice, with the oldest movie on this list that is safe to call a must-see. All Quiet on the Western Front (recently remade with a lot more blood and noise, but no less heart!) adapted what was then a still-new anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, relentless in its brutal depiction of life in the trenches. The movie pulls some punches—there are fewer scenes of debilitating diarrhea—but for its time, it pushed the limit of what cinema could achieve in terms of horror and pathos. This was also the first film to win both best director and best picture. Milestone’s win represented two losses for six-time loser Clarence Brown, who had two nominations this year for Anna Christie and Romance.
Frank Lloyd — 1930
The Divine Lady (1929)
The second Academy Awards ceremony was the first to award just one best director. The first, as you’ll see, broke the directing category into two separate prizes for drama and comedy. This year, the winner was Frank Lloyd, his first of two wins, for The Divine Lady, a silent film with synchronized music and singing set in the late 1800s concerning the British aristocrat Lady Hamilton and her relationship with Admiral Nelson. It did not win best picture (The Broadway Melody did), making it one of only two films to win best director without even a best picture nomination. What was the other one? Read on, we’re almost done.
Lewis Milestone — 1929
Two Arabian Knights (1927)
The first Academy Awards were weird. They were still figuring things out, and there were two awards for best director: Lewis Milestone, who would later win for the upsetting war drama All Quiet on the Western Front, won the one for best director of a comedy picture with Two Arabian Knights. But that film was not nominated for either best picture or unique and artistic picture (the latter category was soon dismissed). This silent film about American POWs who somehow end up in Arabia was thought lost for decades and was recently preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
Frank Borzage — 1929
7th Heaven (1927)
Unlike Two Arabian Knights, Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven, which won best director for a dramatic picture, was also nominated for best picture. It lost, of course, to Wings, William Wellman’s action film. (That strange “best unique and artistic picture” prize went to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a real breakthrough in cinematic form.) 7th Heaven is a silent film about down-and-out Parisians whose life is turned asunder by the outbreak of World War I. You can watch it on YouTube.
What director has won the most Academy Awards?
Well, it kinda depends on how you look at it. John Ford won four best-director Oscars, for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). But Walt Disney was also a director, and he received a whopping 22 Oscars (in addition to several noncompetitive prizes from the Academy). But they were mostly for short subjects and animated films he produced, not the ones he directed himself. (No love for The Mechanical Cow.)
Who won best director in 2024?
Christopher Nolan.
Who won two Oscars for best director?
Lots of people, including Frank Borzage, Alfonso Cuarón, Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, David Lean, Ang Lee, Frank Lloyd, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Leo McCarey, Lewis Milestone, Steven Spielberg, George Stevens, Oliver Stone, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, and Fred Zinnemann. As you can see above, John Ford won four Oscars for best director, so there was a period in time in which he won two. The same could be said for Frank Capra and William Wyler, who both won three.
How many Oscar-winning directors are there?
Oy, these questions. “Are” implies still living, but maybe you mean winners in general? Either way this is going to involve some counting.
There have been 96 Oscar ceremonies, and each of them gave a best-director prize, but the first included directing awards for both comedy and drama. As you can see above, several directors have won more than once. However, there have also been some team wins, for movies like West Side Story, No Country For Old Men, and Everything Everywhere All At Once. I am now going to print something out and grab a pencil. You see what I do for you?
There have been 75 Oscar-winning directors.
There are 37 living Oscar-winning directors as of publication date. (But some of these dudes are old.)
