Oscars 2018: 8 Most Game-Changing Nominations

4. Greta Gerwig - Best Director

Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird was popular among Academy voters, with five nominations including Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress, and Original Screenplay. The fifth, though, was reserved for Gerwig herself, who became only the fifth woman in history to be nominated for Best Director, and the first since Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 (The Hurt Locker).

Like with cinematographers, part of the reason is that women don't make up as high a percentage of directors as men, and Gerwig's nomination - at a time when there's a real push for change in Hollywood and wider society - should help the process of adjusting that.

It's also important that she's been nominated for what's very much a female-led and feminine movie; Bigelow, the most acclaimed female director of the last 20 years, tends to tell more masculine stories (and Bigelow is the only woman to actually win the award). With Lady Bird performing so well here, and Wonder Woman (overlooked at the Oscars, though it wasn't really snubbed anywhere) doing big box-office numbers, it could be the sign of the beginning of a shift on that front.