Oscar Oddity #21: Directors to Lose 3 Oscars in One Night

Linklater and Anderson are part of a small club.

Oscar Oddity #20: W.S. Van Dyke

Oscar Oddity #18: Jack Conway

Myrna Loy and Jack Conway.

Top 10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees That Weren't Nominated for Best Director

Her is in good company.

Oscar Oddity #17: Frank Borzage

Best Director: A Complete List of Winners

Orson Welles scored consecutive wins.

On Friday, I'll begin posting full lineups of each category I've done for my Decades feature. I'll be posting them by year, and I'll post a lineup from a different decade each week. (But more on that later.)  In addition to those categories, I wanted to add Best Director to the lineup, so here's all of my winners. Most match my Best Picture winners, but those that do not are indicated with an asterisk (*).

The Split: Picture/Director

Since their inception, the Academy Awards have had years in which the categories of Best Picture and Best Director were split between two films respectively.

This has happened 21 times out of 83 ceremonies.

The Academy's splits:
1927/28: Picture - Wings/Director - Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven
1928/29: Picture - The Broadway Melody/Director - Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady
1930/31: Picture - Cimarron/Director - Norman Taurog for Skippy
1931/32: Picture - Grand Hotel/Director - Frank Borzage for Bad Girl
1935: Picture - Mutiny on the Bounty/Director - John Ford for The Informer
1936: Picture - The Great Ziegfeld/Director - Frank Capra for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
1937: Picture - The Life of Emile Zola/Director - Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth
1940: Picture - Rebecca/Director - John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath
1948: Picture - Hamlet/Director - John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1949: Picture - All the King's Men/Director - Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives
1951: Picture - An American in Paris/Director - George Stevens for A Place in the Sun
1952: Picture - The Greatest Show on Earth/Director - John Ford for The Quiet Man
1956: Picture - Around the World in 80 Days/Director - George Stevens for Giant
1967: Picture - In the Heat of the Night/Director - Mike Nichols for The Graduate
1972: Picture - The Godfather/Director - Bob Fosse for Cabaret
1981: Picture - Chariots of Fire/Director - Warren Beatty for Reds
1989: Picture - Driving Miss Daisy/Director - Oliver Stone for Born on the Fourth of July
1998: Picture - Shakespeare in Love/Director - Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan
2000: Picture - Gladiator/Director - Steven Soderbergh for Traffic
2002: Picture - Chicago/Director - Roman Polanski for The Pianist
2005: Picture - Crash/Director - Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain

My own splits:
1941: Picture - The Maltese Falcon/Director - Orson Welles for Citizen Kane
1957: Picture - 12 Angry Men/Director - Ingmar Bergman for The Seventh Seal
1960: Picture - The Apartment/Director - Alfred Hitchcock for Psycho
1963: Picture - The Great Escape/Director - Federico Fellini for 8 1/2
1965: Picture - Von Ryan's Express/Director - David Lean for Doctor Zhivago
1992: Picture - Glengarry Glen Ross/Director - Clint Eastwood for Unforgiven
1995: Picture - Before Sunrise/Director - Michael Mann for Heat