So Eastwood is now a double Oscar winner as a director, a double Oscar winner as a producer, and four of the last eight acting winners have been overseen by Clint's direction - Sean Penn & Tim Robbins for
Mystic River last year, and Hilary Swank & Morgan Freeman for
Million Dollar Baby this year. They join Gene Hackman who won Best Supporting Actor for
Unforgiven. Clint's previous Best Actor nods from
Unforgiven and
Million Dollar Baby, Meryl Streep in
The Bridges of Madison County and Marcia Gay Harden from
Mystic River are the other acting nominations in Eastwood-directed films (Jeff Bridges also received a Best Supporting Actor nom in the Malpaso/Eastwood produced
Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, directed by Michael Cimino).
Now here's some Best Director Oscar trivia to digest. As a double winner, Clint joins pretty rare company. There are only three other living and currently working directors who have two Oscars as Best Director: Milos Forman, Oliver Stone and Stevie Spielberg (Robert Wise is still with us but has retired). Here's the list of all multiple winners as Director...
- John Ford
four wins in five nominations
(The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was My Valley and The Quiet Man)
- Frank Capra
three wins in six nominations
(It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can’t Take it with You)
- Leo McCarey
two wins in three nominations
(The Awful Truth and Going My Way)
- Lewis Milestone
two wins in three nominations
(Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front)
- Frank Borzage
two wins in two nominations
(Seventh Heaven and Bad Girl)
- Frank Lloyd
two wins in four nominations
(The Divine Lady and Cavalcade)
- Joseph L. Mankiewicz
two wins in four nomination
(A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve)
- Elia Kazan
two wins in five nominations
(Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront)
- George Stevens
two wins in six nominations
(A Place in the Sun and Giant)
- William Wyler
three wins in twelve nominations
(Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur)
- Billy Wilder
two wins in eight nominations
(The Lost Weekend and The Apartment)
- David Lean
two wins in seven nominations
(The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia)
- Robert Wise
two wins in three nominations
(West Side Story and The Sound of Music)
- Fred Zinnemann
two wins in seven nominations
(From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons)
- Milos Forman
two wins in three nominations
(One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus)
- Oliver Stone
two wins in three nominations
(Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July)
- Steven Spielberg
two wins in five nominations
(Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan)
- Clint Eastwood
two wins in three nominations
(Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby)
Milestone, Lloyd and Borzage won their multiples under the older nominations system during the initial years of the Academy Awards, which among other oddities had director broken up into drama and comedy subcategories. And no, that's not a typo for William Wyler's stats: he received an astounding
twelve nominations in his career.
Clint has a damn good chance (especially with Momma's genetics) to get at least one more trophy to tie with William Wyler and Frank Capra at three, and an outside chance to get a fourth and tie the all-time champion John Ford (who strangely enough never won an Oscar for one of his Westerns, which is what he's most known for). At sixty-years-old and given the kind of sentimental big-budget material he usually helms, Spielberg probably has an even better chance at going for three and four.
And for us who are Scorsese fans too, here's a pretty encouraging list to comfort us in a way...
NEVER BEST DIRECTOR at the OSCARS (the honorable company)- Alfred Hitchcock
five nominations & zero wins
(Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window, Psycho)
- Robert Altman
five nominations & zero wins
(MASH, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park)
- Martin Scorsese
five nominations & zero wins
(Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator)
- Stanley Kubrick
four nominations & zero wins
(Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon)
- Sidney Lumet
four nominations & zero wins
(12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict)
- Federico Fellini
four nominations & zero wins
(La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Satyricon, Armacord)
- Ingmar Bergman
three nominations & zero wins
(Cries & Whispers, Face to Face, Fanny & Alexander)
- David Lynch
three nominations & zero wins
(The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive)
- William Wellman
three nominations & zero wins
(A Star is Born, Battleground, The High and the Mighty)
- Otto Preminger
two nominations & zero wins
(Laura & The Cardinal)
- Orson Welles
one nomination & zero wins
(Citizen Kane)
- John Cassavetes
one nomination & zero wins
(A Woman Under the Influence)
- Howard Hawks
one nomination & zero wins
(Sergeant York)
- Terrence Malick
one nomination & zero wins
(The Thin Red Line)
- Krzysztof Kieslowski
one nomination & zero wins
(Three Colours: Red)
- Jean Renoir
one nomination & zero wins
(The Southerner)
- Akira Kurosawa
one nomination & zero wins
(RAN)
- François Truffaut
one nomination & zero wins
(Day for Night)
- Joel & Ethan Coen
one nomination & zero wins
(Fargo)
- Sergio Leone
never nominated
- Jean-Luc Godard
never nominated
- Nicholas Ray
never nominated
- Werner Herzog
never nominated
- Charlie Chaplin
never nominated
- Roberto Rossellini
never nominated
- Preston Sturges
never nominated
- Fritz Lang
never nominated
- Sam Peckinpah
never nominated
- Luis Buñuel
never nominated
- Spike Lee
never nominated
- Luchino Visconti
never nominated
- Wim Wenders
never nominated
- Andrei Tarkovsky
never nominated
- John Sayles
never nominated
- Vittorio De Sica
never nominated
- Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
never nominated