Best Director: 1931-32, Day Eleven

Five years in, and already the Academy was repeating itself!

The nominees for Best Director, 1931-32, had all been here before. Josef von Sternberg had just been nominated the previous year for Morocco, when he lost to Skippy's Norman Taurog. King Vidor was on his third go-round, having been previously nominated at the Third Academy Awards for the all-Black musical Hallelujah, which he lost to Lewis Milestone for All Quiet on the Western Front, and at the First Academy Awards, where he was nominated for The Crowd. The man he lost to, the first-ever winner for Best Director, was none other than Frank Borzage, nominated then for Seventh Heaven.

And now we have Borzage on his second nomination, for Bad Girl. And guess what? He won again! Two for two? Not so bad, Mr. Borzage. But let's take a closer look, shall we?

Day Six: Director, 1956

John Ford has an unbeaten record of four Oscars for Best Director. I note this because he was not nominated in 1956, despite this being the year he gave us The Searchers, largely regarded as perhaps the greatest western of all time! Could be that his record worked against him: after all, it was just four years earlier that he got the fourth for The Quiet Man, and he was never nominated again, despite all that came after: Mogambo, The Searchers, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance...

Also absent: Cecil B. DeMille of The Ten Commandments, not just the helmer of the year's biggest moneymaker, but the only director of a Best Picture nominee left off the Best Director nominations. I guess he was seen more as a producer than a director: the one time he was nominated in the second category, was the year Ford won his fourth. Still, DeMille won Best Picture for The Greatest Show on Earth that same year, stunning many and subsequently going down in history as one of the worst Best Picture winners of all time. I've not seen it, I can't say, but I guess, like Ford going four-for-five, they figured he was honored enough. The Ten Commandments wound up being his final film.

In DeMille's stead was King Vidor, a fellow veteran of Early Hollywood, who received his first Oscar nomination at the first Academy Awards, for directing The Crowd. He had not been nominated since 1938's The Citadel, and wouldn't win until 1979 - an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

Still, he did get to be part of this lineup: