Oscars: Chloé Zhao, Emerald Fennell make history, 2 women get nominated for Best Director

For the first time in its 93-year history, Oscars 2021 has seen two women getting nominated for Best Director award, featuring filmmakers Chloé Zhao for Nomadland and Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman. With their nominations, Zhao and Fennell have also bagged another milestone– joining the only five women nominated for Best Director in the Academy Award's history. 

While Oscars 2021 features two women in its Best Director category for the first time ever, Chloé Zhao also becomes the first Chinese woman and the first woman of color to receive an Oscar nomination for the category. Notably, Chloe Zhao's Nomadland has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards including– Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.

On the other hand, Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman has been nominated for five academy awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

Even more prominently, if Chloé Zhao or Emerald Fennell do manage to bag the trophy, they would become just the second woman named Best Director in Oscar's history, the first in more than a decade. A woman was last accoladed as Best Director in Oscars 2010, with Kathryn Bigelow winning the award for her Iraq War film- The Hurt Locker.

All Oscar nominations for Best Director

• Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”)
• David Fincher (“Mank”) 
• Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”) 
• Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) 
• Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the Oscar nominations for 2021 on Monday. This year’s Oscar nominations were announced by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and her husband Nick Jonas. The Academy Awards 2021 will take place on April 25. Like the Golden Globes, this year the Oscars 2021 will also take place virtually amid the Coronavirus pandemic.