Many movie buffs love to complain about the Oscars, me more so than anyone else, but I have to admit something. If you break down the awards decade by decade, from the 1930s to the "noughties," the Best Director category shaped up to be the best one, ever, over these past ten years. Let's take a look.

The 1930s: Frank Borzage won, but for one of his less interesting movies, Bad Girl. John Ford won for The Informer, a gorgeous film that has since fallen out of favor with critics and fans. I'm not even sure what to say about Norman Taurog for Skippy or Frank Lloyd for Cavalcade. (Has anyone seen those movies in the past 30 years?) Frank Capra won three times (!) during this decade. I like Capra, but I don't really love him; I'd say he probably deserved one Oscar, maybe for It Happened One Night, but not two others for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can't Take It With You. Of course, Victor Fleming won for Gone with the Wind, though he only directed about a third of it. And the decade's finest award went to Leo McCarey for his great The Awful Truth, although he also deserved one for Make Way for Tomorrow.


The 1940s: In the upper echelon, the great John Ford won twice, for two really good films, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Billy Wilder won, not for a comedy, but for his alcoholism movie, The Lost Weekend. McCarey won again for Going My Way and John Huston won for The Treasure of the Sierra Madra. Michael Curtiz was a reliable Warner Bros. man, not particularly an artist or an auteur, but he won for his great Casablanca. In the "meh" category we have the classy William Wyler with two awards, for Mrs. Miniver and the unstoppable juggernaut The Best Years of Our Lives, the humorless Elia Kazan for Gentleman's Agreement and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives.

1950s: This was a weak decade, and a very serious one. At the top we have John Ford winning his fourth award for one of my favorites, The Quiet Man, and David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai, though many fans prefer Lean's smaller films to his epics. The great Vincente Minnelli finally won, but for one of his weakest films, Gigi. After that, there's Joseph L. Mankiewicz again for All About Eve, George Stevens twice, for A Place in the Sun and Giant, Fred Zinnemann for From Here to Eternity, Kazan for On the Waterfront, Delbert Mann for Marty, and -- perhaps the most campy fun of that batch -- Wyler again for Ben-Hur.

1960s: Probably the top pick of this decade is Lean, for Lawrence of Arabia, a film that keeps aging well. Billy Wilder's complex The Apartment is up there too, and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy is still interesting, even if Schlesinger's career was very spotty afterward. I love Robert Wise, but West Side Story and The Sound of Music are two of his most bombastic and least interesting films. The otherwise wonderful, delicate George Cukor won his only Oscar for directing the huge, vulgar My Fair Lady. Carol Reed, who made The Third Man, won for a monster musical epic, Oliver! People still love Mike Nichols' The Graduate, which I find a bit dated, and Nichols' career since has been a huge dud. Otherwise, there's Tony Richardson for Tom Jones and Zinnemann again for A Man for All Seasons. (Note: Jerome Robbins also won for co-directing West Side Story.)

1970s: There were some much stronger picks, but also some curious ones. I love that William Friedkin (The French Connection), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather Part II) and Woody Allen (Annie Hall) won. Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) is also an interesting choice. I have interviewed Robert Benton twice, and I think he's great guy, but I'm not sure Kramer vs. Kramer was really the best-directed movie that year. And while I enjoy the flawed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it seems to me that Milos Forman is really a rather impersonal, if still very professional director. After that, it gets a bit shaky: the winners include Franklin J. Schaffner (who?), Bob Fosse, George Roy Hill and John G. Avildsen. The latter won for directing Rocky, when that movie was mostly the brainchild of Sylvester Stallone, who did not win anything. Meanwhile, Avildsen went on to make nothing of interest except Rocky ripoffs. For the record, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Ponaski, Robert Altman, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Sidney Lumet, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were nominated and did not win. Martin Scorsese -- believe it or not -- was not nominated.

1980s: This is perhaps the weakest of all decades, with only Bernardo Bertolucci rising to the top as the most deserving director; his The Last Emperor is a magnificent movie, but perhaps not the director's most revealing. Oliver Stone won twice for two Vietnam movies, but I think we can all agree that most of his subsequent films did not live up to that glory. Warren Beatty, Richard Attenborough, Milos Forman and Sydney Pollack turned in big, polite epics that pleased voters (though at least Amadeus was somewhat funny). Oddly, Robert Redford trounced Martin Scorsese (not to mention David Lynch and Roman Polanski) in 1980, James L. Brooks won for essentially making a big TV movie-of-the-week, and -- worst of all -- Barry Levinson won for the annoyingly popular Rain Man (beating out -- who else? -- Martin Scorsese).

1990s: Things looked up a bit as Jonathan Demme, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg won three years in a row, with Spielberg repeating his victory in 1998. But the decade kicked off with Kevin Costner beating Scorsese, and then Robert Zemeckis won for the reprehensible Forrest Gump; I couldn't believe this was the same guy who made the superb, scrappy Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Things went back to normal with Mel Gibson, Anthony Minghella, and James Cameron winning for more giant-sized epics. But then the decade wrapped up on an interesting note with Sam Mendes winning for the seemingly un-Oscar-friendly black comedy American Beauty.

2000s: The best decade by far, including Roman Polanski (at last), Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood again, Martin Scorsese (at last), Joel and Ethan Coen and Kathryn Bigelow -- all winning for outstanding films. I'm even happy for Steven Soderbergh, even though he won for one of his least films, Traffic. (Better he should have won for something like sex, lies & videotape, Out of Sight, The Limey, Bubble or Che.) Danny Boyle and Ron Howard aren't exactly great filmmakers, but they each made at least one great film prior to winning. Ang Lee is the most troubling winner; he's a highly impersonal maker of pretty postcards, and his Brokeback Mountain was uneven at best, but it's also interesting for many reasons, and he was a much better choice than Paul Haggis...