3. Jane Campion
Best Film: The Piano (1993) Finally we get to a female director with sustained success. The Kiwi Jane Campion has directed seven feature films since her excellent 1989 debut Sweetie. Her most famous film, and the one that earned her one of the other Best Director nominations for a woman, is The Piano which won Oscars for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay for Campion. And unlike other Oscar darlings like The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love, The Piano has aged particularly well and remains to be a moving and beautiful story (despite the inclusion of Harvey Keitel's penis). But Campion's continued success shows that she isn't just a flash in the pan, whose later work includes Portrait of a Lady (1996), the underrated Holy Smoke! (1999), and the overlooked Bright Star (2009). She dove into the miniseries format for this year's wonderful crime drama Top of the Lake and showed that she still has an impressive storytelling panache. Top of the Lake is great series, but for my viewing pleasure I hope she gets back to directing feature films.