20 Celebrated Filmmakers Who Never Won A Best Directing Oscar

Robert Altman (1925-2006)
Directing Nominations:  “MASH” (1970), “Nashville” (1975), “The Player” (1992), “Short Cuts” (1993) and “Gosford Park” (2001)
Other Oscar History: Surprisingly, no Altman film ever won Best Picture, despite his Academy-friendly ensemble casts. He did get the late-career fillip of an honorary Oscar in 2006, but died just months after receiving that award (when he had quipped that it was premature as he might have another “four decades” of moviemaking in him). Trivia factoid: “There Will Be Blood,” was dedicated to Altman by Paul Thomas Anderson.
What Should They Have Won For: Altman had a long and prolific career—in addition to the films you know, here are 10 you might not—but it feels like the nominations fell about right, even if they never yielded a win. So a case could be made for the wry cynicism of “MASH,” with its pioneering use of overlapping sound (a technique that remained a staple of Altman’s), while “Nashville” may still be the apotheosis of the sweeping-yet-intimate scale he was famous for. But we’re going to go with one of our favorite inside-baseball Hollywood movies ever, “The Player.” Perhaps too pointed and acerbic a satire on the industry to be fully embraced by it, it’s still a major achievement in self-awareness that it manages to be the very thing it sends up: a brilliantly exciting, entertaining, starry Hollywood movie.

Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)
Directing Nominations: “12 Angry Men” (1957), “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Network” (1976) and “The Verdict” (1982)
Other Oscar History: All four of those movies received Best Picture nominations, though none won, while documentary “King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery To Memphis,” co-directed with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, got a non-fiction nod. Lumet also received a screenplay nomination, shared with Jay Presson Allen, for 1981’s “Prince Of The City,” and won an honorary award in 2005.
What Should They Have Won For? As our retrospective from a couple years back demonstrated, Lumet’s career was a fascinating one, with a certain amount of dross, but a whole brace of classics. He’s the rare filmmaker who made one of his best films after receiving a lifetime achievement award (2007’s “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead“) but the Academy otherwise did nominate the right pictures from his résumé. It’s almost impossible to pick between “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network” in particular, but the latter might edge it for us when it comes to the Directing Oscar. Lumet was always an unshowy filmmaker, and one atypically devoted to the writer. Both are very much writer’s movies, but “Network” is more stylish and a bit more willing to depart from reality (like in the famous Ned Beatty scene), which makes it a more obvious showcase for Lumet’s talents.

Howard Hawks (1896-1977)
Directing Nominations: “Sergeant York” (1941)
Other Oscar History: Oftentimes when you look into the history of Oscar snubs, you find that rival organizations like the Globes or the Director’s Guild have redressed the injustice somewhat. But that’s not the case for the brilliant, genre-hopping Hawks, who turned out some of the finest Golden Age comedies, but was only ever nominated, even by the DGA, for his more “serious” fare (“Sergeant York” was a patriotic smash hit that was in theaters when Pearl Harbor was attacked). He did get an Honorary Oscar in 1975, but damn, as the director of some of our personal favorite classic Hollywood films, this one still hurts.
What Should They Have Won For: At the non-screwball end of the spectrum, Hawks turned in stone-cold classics “To Have and Have Not,” and “The Big Sleep” both starring Bogie and Bacall. But if we have to choose his pinnacle it’ll be from his comedy catalogue—an area notoriously overlooked by the Academy through the years. And that doesn’t make it much easier: “Ball of Fire,” and “Twentieth Century” are nearly at the races, but it comes down to a Sophie’s Choice between “His Girl Friday” and “Bringing Up Baby,” both of which star Cary Grant and both of which are such touchstones of differing comedy styles (rapid-fire wisecrackery vs. screwball) that we can’t choose between them. Don’t make us.

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
Directing Nominations: None. Yes, you read that right. Well, technically none.
Other Oscar History: Another exclusion that strains the bounds of our credulity, Chaplin is a really an atypical case, in that he actually had 3 Oscars, but none of them were for Directing: one was for Score and the two others honorary. While the second honorary one was a Lifetime recognition-type deal, the first is where the dubiousness of Chaplin even being on this list at all crops up: at the first ever Academy Award ceremony his four nominations, including one in a subsequently defunct category “Best Director of a Comedy Picture” were quashed in favor of giving him a Special Award “for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing ‘The Circus.’” So he kind of did win for directing, except, since that is now officially listed as an Honorary Award, and with Lewis Milestone taking that year’s Comedy Directing Oscar, he kind of didn’t.
What Should They Have Won For: In any case, “The Circus” wouldn’t be our pick for Chaplin’s crowning achievement. In fact, had he won for “The Kid,” or “The Gold Rush,” no one would be complaining, but really “Modern Times,” “The Great Dictator” or “City Lights” are the touchstones, with maybe ‘Times’ just shading it for us, today, because of its perennially relevant themes and its iconic design—not least an end shot which may simply one of the most perfect single images in cinema history.

Sergio Leone (1929-1989)
Directing Nominations: None. Not a bloody one (though “Once Upon A Time In America” got him Golden Globe and BAFTA nods).
Other Oscar History: Nothing. The closest Leone came was an honorary Oscar for composer Ennio Morricone, and the Best Picture win for Clint Eastwood‘s “Unforgiven,” a film dedicated in part to Leone. He wasn’t around for either though, having died in 1989.
What Should They Have Won For? Leone is of the very best directors most comprehensively ignored by the Academy (Quentin Tarantino considers “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” the best-directed film in history), but it’s sort of understandable to see why he was passed over. His reputation is one that’s only grown greater over the years; at the time, his ‘Dollars’ trilogy were considered foreign-made cheapies, while “Once Upon A Time In America” was released in the U.S. in severely truncated form, receiving more love internationally than in the States. The latter, in theory, was probably his most awards-friendly picture, given that Westerns are often overlooked by the Academy, but we might lean towards “Once Upon A Time In The West,” his final, epic Western, a more elegaic and rich film than the Man With No Name ones, with a measured pace and a near-blasphemous take on American iconography (if only for its casting of Henry Fonda as a villainous child-killer). It’s a defining picture, both for the genre and for its filmmaker.