Not Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock: These are the Hollywood directors who never won and Oscar

As we build up for this year’s Oscars, one in which Jacques Audiard‘s musical drama Emilia Pérez is in line to pick up an eye-watering 13 gongs, let’s look back at some of the industry luminaries who have been surprisingly overlooked by the Academy.

In the list of 73 different directors or directing teams that have collected an Oscar since Frank Borzage became the first recipient of the award in 1928, there have been some glaring omissions.

Many of the directors who never won an Oscar in their career might surprise you - many of them are household names, pioneers in their field who directed movies that have endured the test of time and are considered as masterpieces.

The most famous filmmakers who never won the Best Director Oscar

Apart from being baffling, the reasons why these directors were snubbed are as diverse as they are complex. In many cases, it was just a case of bad timing - their films were released too late for the voting window; or their films were too quirky or profound for a mainstream audience.

Christopher Nolan only gained his first Oscar last year for Oppenheimer, having come away empty-handed in three previous ceremonies in which he received a total of eight nominations (for Memento, Inception and Dunkirk)

Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting cases.

Robert Altman directed not just one but several hugely popular and influential films: M.A.S.H, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, The Player, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Gosford Park - several of which were nominated for Oscars but didn’t win. Altman was never considered for the Best Director award but was recognized in 2005 when he was presented with the Academy Honorary Award.

Alfred Hitchcock the Master of Suspense, received five Academy Award nominations during his career - for Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960). While his oeuvre is widely considered to be timeless and his movies won countless awards, he was overlooked by the Academy.

Like the two mentioned above, Federico Fellini is in a league of his own when it comes to creating movies that are genuine works of art: La Dolce Vita, 8½, Satyricon, Amarcord, Roma Città Aperta... He was nominated for Best Director four times - losing to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story in 1961, Tony Richardson for Tom Jones in 1963, Franklin J. Schaffner for Patton in 1970 and Francis Ford Coppola – The Godfather Part II in 1974.

Believe it or not, Stanley Kubrick never picked up the Best Director award although he did win and Oscar for the best special visual effects in his science fiction masterpiece: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other works such as The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut were misunderstood upon initial release and were only appreciated over the passage of time.

Sidney Lumet was another master film director who should have picked up the Best Director award at least once, having receiving four nominations. He made over 40 movies but his personal honors list doesn’t reflect his talent - one Golden Globe award and an Academy Honorary Award in 2004.

Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa was hugely influential for so many American directors when they were starting out and throughout their careers. His cinematic devices and techniques have been keenly studied and copied. Rashomon, The Idiot, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo are among his more well-known works. Why he was only nominated for Best Director once is anyone’s guess.

There have been many other cases of deserving directors who have been snubbed by the Academy - Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Nicolas Roeg and more recently Ridley Scott, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. All highly revered, but who were either unfairly overlooked, or just unlucky with their timing.

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