Every Academy Award for Best Director: A Complete History of the Winners

Director Chloe Zhao and Frances McDormand, on set of Nomadland, 2020. Parasite remains the only film not in the English language to win best picture, and its director, South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho, beat out powerhouse auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino for his best-director win. (Plus Sam Mendes, a previous winner, and Todd Phillips, who somehow got nominated this year over Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, or The Safdie Brothers.) The best part of the Parasite awards campaign, of course, was the sudden celebrity of Sharon Choi, director Bong’s translator,...