What are the only post-2008 movies to receive Best Director but not Best Picture Oscar nods?

In 2009, the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences (AMPAS) expanded the number of Best Picture Oscar nominees from five to ten. The immediate effect of this shift was that some major studio melodramas got unexpected Best Picture nods. The Blind Side and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close wouldn’t have had a prayer of a Best Picture nod just a few years earlier. In recent years, the expansion of the category to six to ten Best Picture Oscar nominees (the ceremony has returned to a firm ten nominees in the last few years) has opened the door for smaller arthouse titles like Drive My Car and Past Lives to get into the category. Considering those two were the actual best movies of 2021 and 2023, respectively, their presence at the Oscars was very much a boon for the ceremony.

The Best Picture category’s post-2008 expansion has allowed many movies to get into the most prestigious Oscar category. Of course, not every movie can score a Best Picture Academy Award nomination. This includes a trio of movies with a weird historical distinction. They're the only three post-2008 motion pictures to score Best Director Oscar nominations but not also Best Picture nods. This used to be a common occurrence in the days of five Best Picture nominees.  However, it’s utterly baffling to see this transpire in an age with seven or more annual Best Picture nominees. What are these trio of post-2008 movies? How did they come to occupy this weird piece of Oscar trivia? Will they ever joined by further movies? Most importantly, why am I asking you all these questions?

The trio of films in question are Foxcatcher, Cold War, and Another Round. All Best Director scored Best Director Oscar nominations. Yet they each failed to scrape up Best Picture nominations even with an expanded stable of nominees. Putting aside how I or you, dear reader, feel personally about these individual movies, the most baffling of the trio had to be Foxcatcher. Purely from an Oscar nomination perspective, this ceremony loved Foxcatcher. In addition to Bennett Miller’s Best Director nod, Foxcatcher scored a pair of acting nods (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor) and a Best Original Screenplay nomination. Despite all that, a Best Picture nomination eluded Foxcatcher. So fascinating that the Oscar voters felt this was one of the best-acted, written, and directed movies of 2014. However, the film as a whole didn’t get a Best Picture nod.

Cold War and Another Round also didn’t do too shabby with their total Oscar nominations. The former title also scored Best International Feature and Best Cinematography nods. Another Round meanwhile got a Best International Feature nod beyond its Best Director slot. Both titles scoring Best Director but not Best Picture Oscar nominations, unfortunately, reflect a troubling trend across Academy Awards history. It's been exceedingly common for a foreign language title or two to sneak into the Best Director category. More likely than not, every Best Director nominated film would go on to secure a Best Picture Oscar nod…except for the foreign language film.

Before the 85th Academy Awards, only nine foreign language films (one of which was a Clint Eastwood directorial effort financed in America) had ever scored Best Picture nominations. The 1960s alone, meanwhile, had eight foreign language Best Director nominees. It was basically an annual occurrence to laud masters like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman in this category. None of Akira Kurosawa’s many masterful motion pictures got into the Best Picture Oscars category. However, he did finally secure a Best Director nomination at the 58th Academy Awards for Ran. On and on the examples go. The go-to default pre-2008 for a discrepancy between Best Picture and Best Director nominations was likely a foreign language film.

This relationship between the two Oscar categories didn’t just involve the exclusion of foreign language films in Best Picture. It also saw more mainstream Best Picture contenders missing out on Best Director nods. If a more mainstream-skewing American movie was up for Best Picture, it would typically lose a Best Director nomination to a more acclaimed “artsier” foreign title.

The Towering Inferno scored a Best Picture and seven other Oscar nominations at the 47th Academy Awards. However, François Truffaut got a Best Director nod that year for Day for Night. The following year, Fellini got a Best Director nod for Amarcord instead of Steven Spielberg for Best Picture nominee Jaws. At the 67th Academy Awards, the mainstream Stephen King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption missed out on complimenting its Best Picture nominee with a Best Director Oscar nod. Krzysztof Kieślowski for Three Colours: Red was nominated instead.

Such a dynamic reflects how, pre-2008, the Best Picture and Best Director nominees often had discrepancies. The majority of Best Picture nominees scored Best Director Oscar nods. However, typically each ceremony saw variations between nominations in the two categories. Across the ten 1990s Academy Awards ceremonies, 15 features scored Best Director Oscar nods but not Best Picture nominations. Just the first three ceremonies of the decade alone each had two Best Director nominees who didn’t see their films simultaneously get into Best Picture. If anything, this was a common occurrence, an inevitable byproduct of having just five Best Picture nominees. The more limited number of nominees meant that, inevitably, the Best Director and Best Picture categories couldn’t always perfectly align.

Things change, though, and for the last 14 Oscars ceremonies, the Best Picture field has consisted of seven to ten nominees. Now that this category significantly outnumbers Best Director in sheer nominees, it’s far more puzzling and less common when films don’t get nods in both domains. In the ten Oscar ceremonies across the 2000s, eight filmmakers got Best Director nominations without also scoring Best Picture recognition. Over the last 14 years, that number's dwindled to just three.

What’s extra fascinating about this trio of movies is (beyond the Academy’s infamous struggles to consistently recognize foreign language features) the lack of a grand conspiracy explaining their lack of Best Picture nominations. It’s simply the luck of the draw. All three, however, likely got hurt opening in years without a concrete number of Best Picture nominees. From 2011 to 2021, the Best Picture category didn't concretely house five or ten movies annually. For a decade, the actual number of nominees could be anywhere from six-to-ten. If a firm ten Best Picture nomination slate had been on the table during the years Foxcatcher, Cold War, and Another Round debuted, it’s almost certain they would’ve entered that category.  

Foxcatcher, Cold War, and Another Round. Three movies that couldn’t be more different from one another. Now, they’re forever bound together as both reminders of older Academy Award category discrepancies and a piece of geeky award season trivia. It’s astonishing to consider the unexpected things that bind people and art. Sometimes, it’s something as obscure and specific as being the only post-2008 movie to garner Best Director Oscar nominations without also getting simultaneous Best Picture nods.