Alfonso Cuarón wins Oscar for best director for Roma

Alfonso Cuarón has won the Oscar for best director at the 91st Academy Awards for Roma, reports The Guardian. 

This is the second time Cuarón has taken the award, after winning in 2014 for his space drama Gravity. 

This year, Cuarón triumphed over a strong field including Spike Lee for the police-infiltration drama BlacKkKlansman, Paweł Pawlikowski for epic Iron Curtain romance Cold War, and Yorgos Lanthimos for the period black comedy The Favourite. 

It is the fifth time in six years a Mexican director has won the award, with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu winning in 2015 and 2016 for Birdman and The Revenant respectively, and Guillermo del Toro in 2018 for The Shape of Water, as well as Cuarón in 2014.

Cuarón has won all the major best director awards this season, including the Bafta, Golden Globe and Directors Guild awards.

He also acted as cinematographer and writer on Roma, which is based on memories of his own childhood in 1970s Mexico City, and centres on Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) an indigenous live-in maid for a middle-class family.

In his acceptance speech, Cuarón thanked the stars Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, saying “they are the film”.

He then continued to thank the Academy “for recognising a film centred around an immigrant woman - one of the 70m people around the world without workers’ rights”.

He described Roma as a film that brings to the fore the sort of character more often relegated to the background in films, “at a time when we are being encouraged to look away”.

However, Cuarón’s success with Roma is not without controversy, due to streaming giant Netflix’s involvement in the film’s distribution. Its minimal theatrical release to qualify for awards, as well as a heavy-spending awards campaign, has raised questions.

In the UK, the Vue cinema chain has vowed to boycott the Bafta awards if cinemas’ “theatrical window” is not respected.