For the second consecutive year, the Best Picture Oscar has been all in the family.
Husband and wife Sean Baker and Samantha Quan have earned statuettes for producing the comedy-drama “Anora,” one year after spouses Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas won the same award for “Oppenheimer.”
Baker and Quan, who shared the award with producer Alex Coco, are the fourth — or fifth, technically; see the “Lord of the Rings” team below — romantic partners to score the Oscar’s most coveted prize.
Julia Phillips was the first female producer to ever win Best Picture, 51 years ago, for the 1973 mystery drama “The Sting,” which she produced alongside Tony Bill and her then-husband Michael Phillips. They divorced the same year as their Oscar win, but continued to work together, producing “Taxi Driver” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Phillips wrote the brutal, blistering and best-selling memoir “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” chronicling her experience in Hollywood, before her death in 2002.
In 1990, spouses Richard Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck won Best Picture for producing “Driving Miss Daisy.” They were married until Richard’s death in 2012. Lili Fini Zanuck directed the gritty drama “Rush” in 1991 and continues to produce, winning an Emmy in 2015 for the biopic “Bessie” starring Queen Latifah.
In 2004, partners Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson also won Best Picture (with fellow producer Barrie M. Osborne) for “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
Walsh and Jackson have two children together but have never official married. “He’s never asked me, and if he did, I probably wouldn’t say yes,” Walsh told the New York Times in 2012.
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