In 86 years, only four women have been nominated for a best director Oscar. Only one, Kathryn Bigelow, has won. Lina Wertmuller was the first woman nominated for the 1976 film, Seven Beauties. Jane Campion was number two for the 1993 film, The Piano. Sofia Coppola is number three for the 2003 film, Lost in Translation, and number four is the only one to make it to the podium, Kathryn Bigelow for her film The Hurt Locker. As you can tell from these very low numbers it is very difficult for a woman to garner a best director nomination. There are several reasons for this. One reason is the low number of women in the directing branch. The way that you get an Oscar nomination is that the individual branch members nominate you. Of the over 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, only 377 are members of the directing branch. And, only 36 of those 371 people are women. That’s under 10%. The second reason is that many women — though not all women as exemplified by Kathryn Bigelow — make movies about women. These movies are never seen to have the gravitas as movies about men. In 2014, only two of the nine films nominated for best picture — Gravity and Philomena — told stories about women, and none of those nine were directed by a woman. In 2013, again there were nine best picture nominations, and two — Beasts of a Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty — had women (one has a girl) as the central character. And keep in mind that Kathryn Bigelow who won many critics awards as best director for that film was passed over by the Academy for her second nomination. When she makes a movie about men at war she gets the win, but when she makes a movie about war with a central female character she gets snubbed.

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