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 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 (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 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 All About Eve in 1949/50).
Ford leads the all-time winner list with four Best Director Oscars, having also won for 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.