Toronto's Sarah Polley Snubbed For Oscars 'Best Director' & No Women Were Nominated

Toronto director Sarah Polley has been snubbed by the 2023 Oscars nominations this year and fans are not happy with the lack of female representation.

Polley's film Women Talking has been nominated for Best Picture but Polley is nowhere to be seen in the Best Director category.

In fact, no women can be found in the category, with male directors sweeping nominations across the board this year.

The Best Director category includes nominees Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin, Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Todd Field for Tár, and Ruben Östlund for the Triangle of Sadness.

McDonagh, Kwan and Scheinert, Speilberg, Field and Östlund's films were all also nominated for Best Picture, among other categories.

By these standards, it seems Polley should have been a contender for the category, considering she co-wrote the screenplay and directed Women Talking, but for whatever reason, she didn't make the cut.

She was, however, nominated for the Adapted Screenplay category.

Fans have taken to Twitter to express their disappointment in the Best Director nominees.

"Apparently WOMEN TALKING directed itself to a Best Picture nomination after Sarah Polley wrote the script for which she was nominated," wrote one Twitter user.

Another fan pointed out the Oscar's history of overlooking female directors.

"The messaging our entire lives is something like, well, they didn't get the nominations so the women directors + their films must not be good enough. Gina Prince-Bythewood, Chinonye Chukwu, Sarah Polley - they made EXCEPTIONAL FILMS. Best director doesn't mean best daddy, FFS," reads their tweet.

Another user piled onto the lack of female representation in the Best Director category, writing, "So according to #Oscars2023 there were no women directed movies this year?"

Polley took to Twitter in the wake of her nomination and shared that she had "low expectations" for the day.

"Expectations were low for today. Here I am at a routine doctor's appointment. I really didn't plan this day right," she wrote.

On the bright side, Polley is bringing in two Oscar nominations, and fans can tune into the show on March 12, 2023, to see if Women Talking takes any home.