Award season has not been kind to female directors in 2018. There were no women directors nominated at the Baftas, nor at the Golden Globes, where Natalie Portman introduced “the all-male nominees” when taking the stage, and stars have lined up to blame a wider gender imbalance in the industry for the discrepancy.

Ahead of the Academy Award nominations, we asked you to tell us which female directors had impressed with their work this year, and why they deserved to be nominated for awards. Here are four of the films and their directors that seemed to resonate most with readers, along with your reasons for choosing them.

Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees

Judith More, film costumer, Savannah, Georgia

Not only a beautifully directed and acted film but an important film about a dark time in Americas history. What resonated with me was the terrible social stigmatism that was prevalent in the South at that time (and for decades after.) What Dee Rees did so skillfully was to portray the leading characters as ordinary people trapped in a situation not of their making. She opens the audience’s eyes to the cruelty of racism. It deserves to be awarded an Oscar because it made us think and feel for a group of people who lived 70 years ago and maybe to help us prevent those dark times from coming back.

In my department, women dominate, but in general, women have to work twice as hard just to be heard in the industry. There is too much gender harassment, which happens every time a man in charge looks over the head of a bright woman to talk to the man behind her. We can only change that by teaching the next generation of men to respect a woman’s brain as well as her body.

Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Hilary Thomas, actor, London

This is a powerful and uncompromising indictment of racism in a forgotten piece of history, totally relevant in America and elsewhere today. It is brilliantly acted (particularly by an understated John Boyega) and directed, gripping the viewer from start to finish. It is beyond me why it has not been nominated. In a year where inequality and sexual harassment has been exposed, it is shocking that Bigelow is not rewarded for her committed and original work.

Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig

Adina Glickstein, film student, New York

I loved Lady Bird for its doing the trope-y coming-of-age film better than anyone.

Gerwig’s directorial expertise shines as she negotiates the conventions of a film like this – an outsider’s flirtation with popularity, kitschy prom decorations, and the ambivalence of leaving a reluctantly beloved hometown to move where the culture is – effortlessly, expertly pacing her film so as to cover all the key senior-year milestones, never rushed but never dwelling too long.

The film’s success is a welcome corrective to the underrepresentation of female directors in popular cinema. While independent film may fare slightly better than Hollywood in this regard, the gendered inequity in film production is extremely disheartening. As a young woman in film studies, it’s easy to feel discouraged when the majority of prominent voices in directing, programming, and criticism all so little resemble my own. The Intro to Film Studies course that I took as a first-year at Barnard College – Gerwig’s alma mater, where I’m currently pursuing my degree – didn’t feature a single woman on the syllabus.

Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins

Johanna, drama student, London

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman has received critical acclaim and smashed Box Office records proving that people do in fact want to see films made by women, and about women, in which they have actual relationships with each other, about mothers and daughters, warriors, and children. It is necessary to not only celebrate the work but the women who did it. They must be invisible no longer. If the Academy value the industry they are supposed to honour, they must and will nominate directors like Jenkins and give them visibility and then in a decade’s time, we might have got somewhere.

As a student award ceremonies are my inspiration: they inspire me to watch more genres, pay attention to certain things, find out why other artists are in the business and why exactly I want to be a film maker. If we want female representation in directing (and producing etc.) to be even reasonably proportional we need to honour the women who are already there, so my generation, and the next generation of female film fanatics, can believe in the possibility of becoming film makers.