Have Any Female Directors Won the Academy Award for Best Director or Best Picture?

Kathryn Bigelow is generating a lot of Academy Award buzz for her war movie, 'The Hurt Locker', and it's looking like she's got a very good shot at winning either the Academy Award for Best Director, the Academy Award for Best Picture, or both. With female directors never seeming to get the attention that their male counterparts do, just getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director or Best Picture is a great honor, and something very few other female directors have accomplished. But have any female directors actually won an Academy Award for Best Director or Best Picture, or would Kathryn Bigelow be the first?

First we'll take a look at the female directors who have been nominated in the Academy Award for Best Director category. Shockingly, only three women have managed to accomplish this, with Lina Wertmuller, an Italian director, being the first of the trio of female directors to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Her 1976 movie 'Seven Beauties', a dark war comedy about a deserter that tries to seduce his way out of a concentration camp, didn't just earn her the Best Director nomination, but an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination, as well. And it wouldn't be until the 90's when the most well-known of the female directors who earned Best Director nominations managed to join this exclusive club.

When it comes to female directors, Jane Campion's name is one of the most recognized and respected out there, and her 1993 movie 'The Piano' garnered a lot of buzz due to its steamy, explicit sex scenes and dark tale about a woman that would do anything to be with her piano. And about a decade later, Sofia Coppola, daughter of the man that blessed us with 'The Godfather' trilogy and then fell off the map, became the last of the trio of female directors to earn an Academy Award nomination for her movie 'Lost in Translation', a bizarre tale about two lonely and lost American souls forming a unique bond in Tokyo. Honestly, aside from Lina Wertmuller, I haven't been all that impressed with the female directors that managed to get nominations, and none of these women managed to actually snag the Academy Award for Best Director, although 'Lost in Translation' and 'The Piano' also were nominated for Best Picture.

Which brings me to the other female directors that have directed movies that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Only four besides Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola have managed to this, with Randa Haines being the first in 1986 with 'Children of a Lesser God', a movie about a speech teacher that falls in love with a death woman (played by the most famous deaf actress ever, Marlee Matlin). Penny Marshall's 1990 movie 'Awakenings', about a physician using a new drug to revive catatonic victims of an encephalitis outbreak, was the next to get an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination, followed by Barbra Streisand's romance/drama in which she also stars, 'The Prince of Tides', about a man who falls in love with his suicidal sister's psychiatrist. And the last of the female directors to get an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination was Valerie Faris, who worked alongside her husband on everybody's favorite dysfunctional family road trip movie, 'Little Miss Sunshine'. And while all of these movies are decent, they still fall short of being included among the best movies of all time, and none of them managed to snag a Best Picture win.

So with the end of the great American female directors and their Academy Award achievements, I now move on to another category that Kathryn Bigelow and 'The Hurt Locker' cannot be nominated in, but one that is extremely intriguing when it comes to female directors: the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. While female directors in America seem to be a pretty weak bunch when it comes to Academy Award competition, this has not been the case internationally. More than a dozen female directors have had their movies nominated in this category, starting in 1959 with Astrid Henning-Jensen's 'Paw'. Here's a complete list of all of the female directors whose movies have been nominated for Best Foreign Language film:

Astrid Henning-Jensen - Paw (1959)
Lina Wertmüller - Seven Beauties (1976)
Diane Kurys - Entre Nous (1983)
María Luisa Bemberg - Camila (1984)
Agnieszka Holland - Angry Harvest (1985)
Coline Serreau - Three Men and a Cradle (1985)
Mira Nair - Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Marleen Gorris - Antonia's Line (1995)
Nana Dzhordzhadze - A Chef in Love (1996)
Berit Nesheim - The Other Side of Sunday (1996)
Caroline Link - Beyond Silence (1997)
Agnès Jaoui - The Taste of Others (2000)
Paula van der Oest - Zus & Zo (2002)
Caroline Link - Nowhere in Africa (2002)
Cristina Comencini - Don't Tell (2005)
Susanne Bier - After the Wedding (2006)
Deepa Mehta - Water (2006)

Out of the female directors here, Caroline Link is the only to have two movies nominated, and she's one of the two female directors on this list to actually win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, with 'Nowhere in Africa' (2002), a film set during the 1930's about a German Jewish refugee family adjusting to a new life on a farm in Kenya. However, the first of the female directors here to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film is Marleen Gorris for 'Antonia's Line' (1995), a very liberal film about a strong-willed matriarchal woman who builds her own colorful family composed of a recluse, the village simpleton, and a retarded girl that has been raped by her brother. The movie explores a variety of subjects including death, sex, lesbianism, and religion. But even while Marleen Gorris is one of the best female directors of our time and deserved this award, it amazes me how many great female directors of the past have been completely shut out from the Academy Awards, including Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, and Claire Denis.

So are there really so few female directors out there in modern times, or are we just neglecting some that we may discover later on, as is the case with the three women mentioned above? I don't know the answer to this, but when it comes to the best female directors of the past decade, I would love to see the first woman win an Academy Award for Best Picture or Best Director in my lifetime, and Kathryn Bigelow is definitely deserving of at least one of these. So be sure to check out a few of the Academy Award nominees and winners by the female directors on this list (as well as a few by the female directors not included), and see how Kathryn Bigelow stacks up against the other members of the very exclusive and elusive club of female directors.

SOURCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Academy_Award_winners_and_nominees_for_Best_Foreign_Language_Film
www.imdb.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award