Sure, the Academy Awards aren't the be-all and end-all when it comes to judging how successful a filmmaker is. It may be the biggest and most widely-discussed awards show for Western audiences, but they don't take into account other measures of success, like box office revenue, critical acclaim (particularly when it comes to smaller critical darlings), or cultural impact (which takes years and years to properly assess).

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That being said, there's still an element of frustration when you look at the numerous great filmmakers who haven't received a Best Picture win for any of their films. The following 10 are among the most surprising. Some have been nominated - and even won - for categories like Best Directing and Best Screenplay, but none have had one of their films win the top prize of Best Picture. The following includes both deceased and still living filmmakers, the latter of whom may naturally earn a Best Picture win one day, while the former regrettably cannot.

Stanley Kubrick

An astronaut walking down a spaceship corridor in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Stanley Kubrick has a reputation that precedes him, and is held up as one of the most important filmmakers of all time. With just 13 feature films released in a little under 50 years, his body of work is quite small, all things considered, but the vast majority of his films are still considered classics.

Furthermore, he showed himself to be a master of multiple genres, making iconic comedies (Dr. Strangelove), horror movies (The Shining), and war movies (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket), among others. This makes it surprising to realize that none of his groundbreaking films ever won Best Picture, though Kubrick himself earned 13 Oscar nominations, and earned one Oscar for his work on the visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Quentin Tarantino

Hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield shoot someone in an L.A. apartment building.
Image via Miramax Films

Quentin Tarantino certainly hasn't been overlooked by the Academy Awards during his career as a filmmaker. For just his second film, Pulp Fiction, he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and then won the same award 18 years later, for Django Unchained.

There have been plenty of other nominations, but no films directed by him have won the Best Picture Oscar, at least not yet. This may be because of strong competition from other films - particularly for Pulp Fiction in 1994 - but whatever the case, time may be running out for one of his movies to win that top award. After all, he's said he wants to retire from directing after his 10th film... and he's currently on nine.

Sergio Leone

Once Upon A Time in the West
Image via Paramount Pictures

It's a shame Sergio Leone was so overlooked during his brief filmmaking career. He helped revolutionize the western genre through several great westerns in the 1960s, before directing the criminally underrated Duck, You Sucker in 1971, and then concluding his filmmaking career with the almost four-hour gangster masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America, in 1984.

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He died just a few years after his last film, and while he had some fans during his lifetime, it wasn't until after his death that his fantastic films truly got the recognition they deserved. This sense of being overlooked wasn't helped by the Academy, who didn't seem to hold his movies in high regard - if they were even aware of him at all - with none of his films earning a single nomination in any category from the organization.

Akira Kurosawa

Ran - 1985
Image via Toho

Perhaps the most well-known Japanese director of all time, Akira Kurosawa was a filmmaker who made a number of classics throughout his lengthy, decades-long career. It's remarkable how well the vast majority of his films hold up, and many have proven to be influential for filmmakers who followed in his wake.

It was rare for any non-English speaking filmmakers to get credit from the Academy in decades past, and this included Kurosawa, for much of his career (this overall sense of snubbing non-English language films is one reason why Parasite's Oscar success for 2019 was such a huge deal). Kurosawa may have earned a well-deserved nomination for his directing on 1985's Ran, and he got an Honorary Award several years after. However, none of his classics were ever nominated for Best Picture.

Spike Lee

Do the Right Thing - 1989

A filmmaker who's as bold and forward-thinking as he is prolific, Spike Lee is among the best American filmmakers working today. His films are often critically praised, and there are a decent number that have received nominations from the Academy Awards over the past few decades.

Still, even if Lee himself finally got a Best Adapted Screenplay win for BlacKkKlansman, and an Honorary Award three years earlier, none of his films have won Best Picture. The aforementioned BlacKkKlansman came close, with it also earning Best Director and Best Picture nominations, but unfortunately, the Academy controversially picked the safer (and, let's face it, inferior) Green Book to win the big prize that year.

Charlie Chaplin

City Lights 1931 - ending

As one of the best filmmakers of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin's legacy admittedly doesn't need a Best Picture win. His films hold up fantastically well and are still beloved, and his films received numerous nominations from the Academy Awards throughout his career, with Chaplin himself interestingly winning his only Oscar for Best Original Score for his 1952 film, Limelight.

Yet when considering all his classic films - including City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator - it's odd that none managed to win the main prize at the Oscars. Perhaps there was always strong competition, and notably, some great Chaplin films, like 1921's The Kid, were released before the Oscars were established, so there's that.

Ingmar Bergman

Death and Antonius playing chess

Ingmar Bergman was the rare foreign filmmaker from the 20th century who actually got a great deal of recognition from the North America-focused Academy Awards. The Swedish filmmaker earned a staggering nine nominations for his films, with most being for Writing and Directing, plus a single Best Picture nomination for 1972's Cries and Whispers.

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His films fared better in the Best Foreign Film categories, but still, Best Foreign Film is a narrower category than Best Picture, with the latter's broadness essentially implying that the film with that title is the best of the year, foreign-language or otherwise. At least Bergman found success in the categories that weren't Best Picture, but that none of his films were able to win - not even the impactful and emotional 1982 epic, Fanny and Alexander - is surprising.

Brian De Palma

Al Pacino firing an assault rifle in Scarface
Image via Universal Pictures

A director who rose to prominence in the 1970s, and continued to work steadily in the following decades, Brian De Palma has directed a wide variety of films throughout his long career. He's made thrillers, gangster movies (perhaps most notably, Scarface in 1983, science-fiction films, and even a war film.

That variety hasn't led to Best Picture gold, however. You'd think after exploring so many types of movies (and so skillfully, too) that eventually, one would prove appealing enough to the Oscars to win the top prize one year, but that level of awards success has unfortunately eluded De Palma who, now in his 80s, seems to be at last slowing down, work-wise.

Ang Lee

Zhang Ziyi and MIchelle Yeoh as Jen Yu and Yu Shu Lien during a sword fight in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Image via Sony Pictures Classics

Ang Lee is a filmmaker who's found a great deal of success at the Oscars, yet has somehow never directed a film that actually won Best Picture. He stands out among directors in a similar boat, given he's twice been awarded with the Best Director of the year award (for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi), yet neither of those won Best Picture.

The lack of a win for Brokeback Mountain is especially notable. Time has been kind to that film (and not very kind to the movie that did win for 2005, Crash), and it losing out on a Best Picture win is rightly seen as one of the Academy's worst snubs. Clearly, Lee has made many great films, and is a supremely talented filmmaker, so hopefully one of his movies will win that award one year.

Fritz Lang

Metropolis - 1927

Another director who made some great films outside the U.S. who was snubbed by the Academy Awards, Fritz Lang was a famous German director who made some of the best films of the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps most notably, he made Metropolis in 1927, which was leagues ahead of just about every movie made around the same time, and has become one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.

And while the Academy overlooking films not in the English language is nothing new, Lang himself came to America in the 1930s, and made numerous movies whilst in Hollywood, all the way up until the 1950s, mostly in the film noir and thriller genres. Regrettably, none of these films ever managed to take home the coveted Best Picture Oscar, either.

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