If Kathryn Bigelow's win was supposed to usher in a new, more progressive era of women directors being more regularly honoured by the Academy, then that supposition has been well and truly disavowed, to the point where not one single woman has even been nominated for Best Director since. Counting the Coens as one and including this year's nominees, there have been thirty Best Director nominations handed out since 2009. The Academy should've used Bigelow as the foundation, the springboard from which to progressively leap off. Instead, they have made Bigelow an anomaly, a pub-quiz trivia question instead of the example-setting example. There have been notable snubs since '09 (Bigelow again for Zero dark Thrity, Andrea Arnold for Fish Tank), but none more so than the refusal to nominate Ava DuVernay for Selma, which was nominated for Best Picture but not deemed worthy enough of a Best Director slot, which seemingly somehow went to Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game instead (the other four nominees were pretty much locked).
