You've Just Won An Academy Award — now what?

George Cukor

Best Director, Best Picture, My Fair Lady, 1964

Besides winning the Oscar for My Fair Lady (1964), George Cukor had a disastrous 1960s. Before taking on the Lerner-Loewe musical, he had officiated over Marilyn Monroe's swan song, Something's Gotta Give (1962), before being fired as part of her resumption package and several other projects had since stalled in development. Industry insiders claimed that Cukor had gone into semi-retirement, so it was a surprise when he agreed to take over 20th Century-Fox's Justine (1969) after Joseph Strick had been sacked following location shooting in Algeria. Adapted from Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the film was much racier than even The Chapman Report (1962), which had its roots in the notorious Kinsey Report, and the critics were unanimous that the 70 year-old veteran was out of his comfort zone. In 1972, Cukor explained, "I took the picture on because I hadn't worked in some time, various projects had fallen through, and it was a professional challenge. I thought, "Yes, I can do this" — but had I known the full horror of some things..."

Carol Reed

Best Director, Best Picture, Oliver!, 1968

Few directors have made so downright an eccentric choice of a post-Oscar project as Carol Reed. Fresh from his triumph with Lionel Bart's Dickensian musical, Oliver! (1968), Sir Carol (who had been the first British director to be knighted in 1953) persuaded Warners to part with $6 million to adapt Claire Huffaker's novel Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian, even though it had provoked gales of protest from Native Americans in the Southwest on account of its perceived racist overtones. Reed did little to soothe feathers by casting Anthony Quinn as Flapping Eagle, a drunkard who vows to lead his people to the promised land after uncovering treaties guaranteeing their rights. Uncomfortably mixing broad comedy with sentimental melodrama and clumsy politicking, Flap (1970) was a monumental flop and Reed only directed one more film before his death in 1976.

John G. Avildsen

Best Director, Best Picture, Rocky, 1976

John G. Avildsen had mixed feelings about receiving his Oscar nomination for Rocky (1976), as around the time it was announced in spring 1977, he was fired from Saturday Night Fever because John Travolta didn't want the film to become a disco-dancing variation on the underdog theme. The Everyman scenario continued to appeal to Avildsen, however, and he rebounded to Slow Dancing in the Big City, in which unprepossessing but cheery New York columnist Paul Sorvino finds an unexpected soul mate in kooky dancer, Anne Ditchburn. Harking back to more innocent screwball times, this shamelessly sentimental romantic mismatch had a self-conscious charm that prompted Variety to opine that "somewhere on the cutting room floor probably is a fine movie." However, the same review lamented that Slow Dancing "has so much heart John Avildsen's aorta is showing." Unsurprisingly, it took only $1,576,500 at the US box office, while its boxing predecessor scooped $225 million worldwide.

Jonathan Demme

Best Director, Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs, 1991

How else do you follow a chiller about a cannibalistic serial killer than with a documentary about a preacher in your family? Yet Cousin Bobby (1992) wasn't Jonathan Demme's initial choice of a project after The Silence of the Lambs (1991) became the first film since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) to win the Big Five Oscars. He originally wanted to profile a double-dutch skipping team to boost the image of African-American kids on screen. However, the picture stalled because of resistance to a white man following a troupe of young black girls. So, Demme took up the Reverend Robert Castle's invitation to visit his mission to the mainly black and Hispanic congregation of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on Harlem's 126th Street. Demme hadn't seen his cousin in over 30 years and he spent 18 months chronicling one man's determined bid to make a difference. Few home movies have ever been so compelling.

James Cameron

Best Director, Best Picture, Titanic, 1997

James Cameron is probably the biggest casualty of Oscar night, as "the King of the World" hasn't released a commercial feature in the 11 years since Titanic (1997) took 11 statuettes (tying Ben Hur's record at the time). It will be 2009 before the long-gestating Avatar finally unspools. Cameron hasn't been idle, however, as he has devoted himself to documentaries about the deep. The Discovery Channel-funded Expedition: Bismarck (2002) took the Canadian director and his crew three miles down into the Atlantic to examine the wreck of the legendary German battleship that was sunk on 27 May 1941. Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) saw Cameron revisit Titanic's last resting place for a 3-D IMAX featurette that some have accused of being no more than a cinematic grave-robbing. Seemingly chastened, Cameron returned to the subject of the ethereality of the ocean floor that he had first broached in The Abyss (1989) for another IMAX stereoscopic, Aliens of the Deep (2005), in which a team of marine biologists and NASA scientists behave like characters in a Jules Verne adventure.