No matter who wins this year’s Best Director Oscar at the Academy Awards on April 25, the winner will be a seasoned filmmaker. There are no first-time nominees, so there will be no luck for newbies this time around. However, in the last few years, over 93 Oscar presentations, some 24 filmmakers have earned Best Director nominations for their directorial debuts. (Find out who has won the Best Director Oscar every year since the Oscars began.)

To determine first-time Oscar nominees, 24/7 Tempo scoured the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Oscars database to find nominations for feature film directing efforts ranked as ” beginnings” by the Academy. Directors are ranked according to the year of their appointment. Data is complete through the 93rd Academy Awards, presented April 25, 2021.

Winning an Oscar nomination for Best Director fulfills the dreams of many actors in the film industry, who may have risen through the ranks as assistant directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, film editors or sound editors. , or have acquired their first directing experience in the theater or for television.

The list also includes five actors-turned-directors: Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Costner. Redford won in 1981 with his directorial debut, “Ordinary People,” and Costner scored the Oscar ten years later for his “Dances With Wolves.” Beatty lost for his first effort at the helm, 1978’s “Heaven Can Wait,” co-directed with Buck Henry, but went on to win for his 1982 film “Reds. Branagh has another hit this year with his autobiographical film “Belfast.” (Here are 25 of the Oscars’ most egregious snubs.)

Five other first-time Best Director nominees won the golden statuette: Delbert Mann, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, James L. Brooks and Sam Mendes.

Click here to see the new Oscar nominees

Some directors on the list only got one Oscar shot and were never nominated again. The much-loved Sidney Lumet was particularly unlucky. After receiving a nomination in his directorial debut for ’12 Angry Men’ (and losing to British director David Lean, who won for his epic ‘Bridge Over the River Kwai’), Lumet has been nominated four times. more for Best Director but was denied each time.