In general, nobody gets an Oscar nomination until you’ve had a career of a certain length; and then when you’ve made a film that has some commercial success in a genre that the academy typically favours.

Kathryn Bigelow is an exception to the rule about female directors partially because she is an exceptional director. One of the best working today. But although many will not have heard of her until her Oscar win, The Hurt Locker was actually her 8th feature film (if you include The Loveless, which she co-directed with Monty Montgomery). These were almost all genre films: Near Dark (1985) was a vampire film; Point Break (1991) was a (peerless) action film; Strange Days (1995) was a science fiction thriller. The Hurt Locker was, of course, a war film, a genre often seen as being awards-worthy. She was working in fields which are traditionally seen as being male-oriented. After twenty years of quality work in mainstream genre films, she finally got a nomination. For a (very, very good) mainstream genre film.

Last year, The Kids Are All Right (2010) was nominated for several awards. It was the work of Lisa Cholodenko, who has directed several low-budget dramas, none of which attracted much awards attention. Cholodenko was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Not director. The Kids Are All Right  was a great film, but it was exactly the kind of family drama that the Oscars love; quirky, comic family, with an issue of some kind (lesbians! adoption!), plus actors who have been nominated multiple times before (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore).

Two highly acclaimed female directors whose efforts have so far been ignored by the Oscars are Lynne Ramsay and Kelly Reichardt, who both made excellent films this year. Ramsay is a Scottish filmmaker who has made only 3 films in nearly 15 years. All of them are wonderfully shot, cleverly written and uniquely atmospheric: Morvern Callar (2002) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) are two of the best British films of recent years. They are resolutely “art-house” films, with little or no mainstream appeal. Neither did much at the box-office. (For what it’s worth, it sounds like Lynne Ramsay’s next will be a space opera of sorts. She’s described it as “Moby Dick in space”.)

(Incidentally, the reason for Ramsay’s long gap between Callar and Kevin? She spent 4 years working on an adaptation of The Lovely Bones before being unceremoniously shunted off the project in favour of the crowd-pleasing, Academy-endorsed Peter Jackson. Jackson’s film of The Lovely Bones was described as “deplorable”, “creepy and pretentious” and “crazy-bad”. It currently holds a rating of 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Reichardt has made 5 films in nearly 20 years. Her films are arguably even more esoteric than Ramsays, though just as highly acclaimed: this year’s super-low-budget, oblique revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff (2010) has an approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. (Reichardt has struck up a great working partnership with Michelle Williams (this year is Williams’s third Oscar nomination, for My Week With Marilyn), who starred in Meek’s Cutoff alongside Bruce Greenwood and Paul Dano, and almost single-handed carried Wendy and Lucy (2008), which is an absolute heartbreaker and I highly recommend it.)

Neither of these extremely talented filmmakers has been recognised for their talent. What about the other end of the spectrum? What about the female directors working on more mainstream fare? Who is the next Kathryn Bigelow?

Well, Patty Jenkins, who directed the Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning performance in Monster (2003), recently signed on to direct Marvel’s Thor 2, as the studio sought to keep star Natalie Portman on board. And Jenkins was promptly fired with no adequate explanation, to be replaced by TV director Alan Taylor. Portman was reportedly furious.

There’s also Catherine Hardwicke, who worked as a production designer for over a decade before taking up directing. Her first film as director was a “gritty” (air-quotes denote skepticism) teen drama called Thirteen (2003), which I must admit I turned off because I didn’t like it at all. She made another two films before hitting the jackpot with Twilight (2008), which, honestly, isn’t terrible. Hardwicke does a pretty good job of turning the vapid source material into something watchable. She was fired from the series. And then she made Red Riding Hood (2011), which I haven’t seen but looked pretty bad. It was not a huge hit. Harwicke evidently has a decent eye as a director, but she’s not good at picking projects. Unless, you know, she actually doesn’t care about what she does, maybe?

Who else is there? There’s Nora fucking Ephron (middle name my addition. She isn’t Amanda Fucking Palmer), director of soppy romance movies. And I must admit, that’s about the extent of female fiction directors I can recall having seen pictures by.

What am I saying? I guess I’m saying that it’s the action films and the mainstream hits that get you the attention to make a film that can win awards, like The Hurt Locker. I mean, that’s the same as it was for Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Coppola. It was the same for the Coens, Fincher and Scott. Is there something deterring female directors from taking on those projects? Is it the producers fault? Or are the majority of female directors just not interested in making that kind of film?