Every awards season has its heroes, but they are almost never wearing capes. Though the comic-book genre dominates Hollywood commercially, superhero movies are rarely represented in major categories on Oscar night.

So Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins has been pleasantly surprised watching her superhero blockbuster collect accolades in recent weeks, including a Producers Guild of America nomination for best picture last week.

“I know that superhero movies have had a very hard time,” Jenkins told Vanity Fair. “I know that women directors have had a very hard time being acknowledged. I know that superhero lead actors don’t get acknowledged. It is what it is . . . So to have my peers acknowledge [Wonder Woman] in this way and celebrate it in this way is a huge honor.”

Jenkins’s film won over audiences and critics months ago. Wonder Woman has collected $821.8 million worldwide since Warner Bros. released it last June, and earned a 92-percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. More recently, the movie received an Art Directors Guild nomination for its production designer, Aline Bonetto, a National Board of Review spotlight for Jenkins and her star, Gal Gadot, and a place on New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis’s top-10 list for the year.

A brief history of Wonder Woman.

As a female-directed, big-budget superhero movie built around a female protagonist, Wonder Woman is in a category of one. In a year when Hollywood women are declaring “Time’s Up” on the gender gap in myriad ways, that achievement has taken on a new relevance.

“When I went into making this film, the mere idea [of] a woman-led film with a female lead was a massive question and really felt like a long shot,” Jenkins said. “I can even remember myself saying, don’t they keep putting out data saying that women are the majority of the audience now? I don’t understand why this is so hard for everybody to see how lucrative that could, and should, be.”

Though Jenkins’s film was an unqualified hit, and the issue of women behind the camera has received increased attention, statistics indicate not much is changing. In the same week that Wonder Woman collected its P.G.A. nomination, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative published research finding that just 4.3 percent of directors across 11 years and 1,100 films—including 2017—were female. And as Natalie Portman noted in her zinger of an introduction to the category at the Golden Globes, all the directing nominees at that awards show this year were male.