How do you win an Academy Award? We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Dismiss Normal text size Even after recent dramas – #OscarsSoWhite controversies and the fiasco when La La Land was wrongly named best picture – an Academy Award remains the ultimate prize in the movie industry. It’s a validation of excellence that comes with more than 90 years of history, celebrity and glamour – as emotional as winning an Olympic gold medal for everyone from famous directors and actors to unknown visual effects technicians, make-up artists and the creators of animated shorts. Part of the cachet is mixing with the movie elite at a ceremony in Los Angeles every February or March (moved to April this year because of the pandemic). But Oscars are also famously hard to win. Some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa – have never won best director. And while it might change this year, American director Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have won.