The directors of popcorn blockbusters and low-budget indies might try to say otherwise, but there’s no denying that winning Best Director at the Academy Awards is the biggest honour a film-maker can achieve. The winner at the 2024 Academy Awards - Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer - is the latest addition to a hallowed list. See below for our guide on where to stream every film that has won Best Director at the Oscars.
In recent years, there has been a clear move by the Academy towards answering the criticism that if you want to be named Best Director, you had better be a white man from America or the UK. Along with co-director Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan won in 2023 for Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie centred on the Chinese-American community. That came two years after Chinese-born Chloé Zhao scooped the statue for Nomadland; the year before that, Korean director Bong Joon-ho was the winner with Parasite.
The 2010s were all about the “Three Amigos”, Mexican directors Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón. Friends for decades, the trio’s parallel careers, all of which included stints working in Mexican television, peaked at the same time, leading to this incredible run of Best Director wins from 2013 to 2018: Cuarón (Gravity), Iñárritu (Birdman), Iñárritu (The Revenant), someone else (Damien Chazelle for La La Land), Del Toro (The Shape of Water), Cuarón (Roma). ¡vamos!
Move back into the White Guy era, and you have a solid list of classics by some of cinema’s greatest exponents. Clint Eastwood won for Unforgiven and again, more than a decade later, for Million Dollar Baby. Martin Scorsese may have been overlooked in his early career, but the Academy finally made up for it by handing him the Best Director Oscar for The Departed. Steven Spielberg also does not live or die by how many awards he wins, but he did take the directing Oscar for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
Here’s a quiz question for your film-fan friends: name the three directors to have won the Best Director Oscar in consecutive years? Alejandro González Iñárritu is one, of course, but major kudos if you know the others without Googling: John Ford (for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley in 1940/41) and Joseph L Mankiewicz (for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve in 1949/50).
Ford leads the all-time winner list with four Best Director Oscars, having also won for The Informer and The Quiet Man. Will that record ever be beaten? Probably not, but owning just one Best Director Oscar is the sign of an extraordinary film-making career. Find out where to watch all the films that have earned that prize with our streaming guide below.
