Greta Gerwig has become the fifth woman ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards, following in the footsteps of Lina Wermuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano, Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation and Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, the latter being the only one to have actually won.
Gerwig’s nomination comes just a few weeks after her close friend Natalie Portman made a pointed comment about the lack of female directors up for the same award at the Golden Globes, by announcing ‘the all-male nominees for best director are…’.
Her debut feature film Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical tale of a teenage girl coming of age in Sacremento in 2002. It made history by becoming the first movie to ever get a 100% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Its star Saiorse Ronan has also been nominated for Best Actress, while Laura Metcalf, who plays her mother, is also up for Best Supporting Actress. Timothee Chalamet, who is nominated for Best Actor in Call Me By Your Name, has a memorable supporting role in the film too, as well as Lucas Hedges, who appears in Best Picture-frontrunner Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Meanwhile, it was also great news for Octavia Spencer, who has become the first woman of colour to be nominated multiple times following her Oscar win for The Help in 2012.
After the #OscarsSoWhite controversy of 2016, there were more nominees of colour in the acting categories, with Daniel Kaluuya and Denzel Washington nominated for Best Actor, and Mary J. Blige and Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress. Get Out’s director and writer Jordan Peele was also recognised in the Best Director and Best Screenplay.
Shape of Water, the surreal thriller from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, made history by picking up 13 nominations, equally Titanic’s feat in 1997. See the full list of nominees
