Oscars: Coralie Fargeat becomes the ninth woman to receive a Best Director nomination
Coralie Fargeat joined an exclusive Oscar list on Thursday morning thanks to her Best Director nomination for The Substance.
She is now the ninth woman to receive a directing bid at the Academy Awards, with the eight other female filmmakers being Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties (1976), Jane Campion for The Piano (1993) and The Power of the Dog (2021), Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (2003), Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (2009), Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird (2017), Chloé Zhao for Nomadland (2020), Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman (2020), and Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall (2023). To date, the only three to win are Bigelow, Zhao, and Campion (The Power of the Dog).
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Joining Fargeat in this year’s Best Director lineup are Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), and James Mangold (A Complete Unknown). All five of them are first-time director nominees. See the complete list of 2025 Oscar nominations.
The Substance is a body-horror film starring Demi Moore as an aging movie star named Elisabeth Sparkle who goes to extreme lengths to stay young again. Fargeat directed, wrote, and produced the project, which also features Margaret Qualley as Sue, a younger version of Elisabeth, and Dennis Quaid as Harvey, an uber-masculine TV exec. The Substance picked up five total Oscar bids.
SEE 2025 Oscars calendar update
Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light) was a major contender to receive an Oscar nomination this year, especially after her Golden Globe bid for directing the Indian road-trip drama. But alas, she was ultimately snubbed. Had Kapadia and Fargeat both gotten in, it would have been the second time ever that two women made the cut with Academy voters in the same year, following the 2021 ceremony with winner Zhao and nominee Fennell.
The lack of gender parity for feature film directors has been an issue for several decades now, and not just at the Academy Awards. “Here are the all male nominees,” Natalie Portman infamously stated while presenting the Best Director category with Ron Howard at the 2018 Golden Globes. Thanks perhaps to the massive media attention generated by that comment, Greta Gerwig ended up garnering an Oscar bid for directing Lady Bird two weeks later.
Find out who wins Best Director and all of the other categories when the 2025 Oscars ceremony airs live on ABC and streams on Hulu on March 2.
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