It’s a peculiarity of the Academy Awards that the Oscars in two different categories—Best Picture and Best Director—have coincided sixty-four out of ninety times, honoring a movie and its director rather than the director of another film. (Since 1953, the awards have coincided fifty-one out of sixty-four times.) Which leads to the question: Why even bother having separate categories? Isn’t the best picture, by definition, directed by the best director? Why not, as David Ehrlich recently asked, at IndieWire, just eliminate the Best Director category? The question isn’t idle—an attempt to answer it gets at a matter at the core of the history of cinema: What is directing?

The distinction between the two awards is suggested by the way in which the respective Oscars are bestowed. For Best Picture, the people whose names are mentioned when the envelope is opened and who go onstage to receive the statuette and give a speech are the producers. They are, for starters, the business people, who arrange for the funding, oversee the spending, and organize the shoot. What’s more, in big-budget studio filmmaking, whether classic or contemporary, they’re all-powerful, retaining the ability over the director to make the final decisions on such matters as casting and editing, ordering reshoots (even by other directors), and maintaining ultimate control over the movie that’s released.

It’s in that gap, as it played out in the classic age of Hollywood—in the distinction between the total and independent creators, who oversee every aspect of their own productions (such as Charlie Chaplin), and studio filmmakers, who were employees directing at the sufferance of studio bosses (such as Nicholas Ray)—that the idea of the modern cinema, of the “auteur,” the director as the actual artistic creator of a movie, came in. It’s a uniquely powerful idea because it’s often an accurate one—it speaks to the experience of viewing, the understanding that the unifying factors of Ray’s films from studio to studio are far stronger (and far more original) than the studio’s imprint on each of them.

In its most extreme and abstract form, this classic concept of direction is, above all, a sense of style applied to recalcitrant or minor material, to stories dictated by the studio and filmed with casts chosen by the studio. Through such displays of style—sensuous virtuosity with images and tones—the best directors exerted, or got away with exerting, a degree of authority, of influence over the material, that’s inseparable from authorship. But this idea also gives rise to a paradox, one that’s actually at the heart of the distinction between awards for Best Picture and Best Director: precisely because directors usually confront complex mechanisms of financing and administration (as well as of power and of technology itself) and need to bend those mechanisms to their own ends in order to make a great movie, directing is essentially inextricable from producing. Having good ideas for how a movie should be, and having the ability to make it so, are inseparable from having good ideas about the practicalities of filmmaking, about money and time, about equipment and administration, about staffing (not just cast but also crew) and working relationships, about technique and methods. A great director is usually, even if in invisible but identifiable ways, also a great producer—and that’s all the more so now, in the age of independent production, than it was at a time when the studio system thrived.

That notion also helps to explain the coincidences and divergences of the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. I was going to put a year-by-year chart together, but a chart already exists, and it proves to be far more revealing in its march through movie history than any mere numerical analysis. What the chart reveals is that, in periods when the movie industry is stable, production and direction are in equilibrium: with commonly recognized and unchallenged modes of production, what producers put into movies is close to what they get out of their hired directors, and the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director closely coincide. The two awards tend to diverge when the relationship between directing and producing becomes unstable, when the very notion of production is being redefined.

The first period of divergence, in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties, found the industry confronting the rise of talking pictures (and, along the way, the Depression). Then, starting in 1948, the industry faced another vast and sudden change, because of a major Supreme Court decision in an antitrust suit that forced the studios to divest themselves of theatres and work with independent producers. In the late sixties and early seventies, the studios confronted a crisis of relevance and viability that gave rise to the so-called New Hollywood, which prevailed (in a variety of forms) until, in the late nineteen-nineties, DVDs, the new generation of independent filmmaking, “quality” TV, and the Internet all shook the studios in ways that are still shaking them.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.

Currently, the industry is in a new, even unprecedented, state of turmoil. In the past decade, studios have mainly gotten out of the good-movie business, or, rather, the director-driven movie business (though there are three such studio movies coming up in the next few weeks—“The 15:17 to Paris,” “Black Panther,” and “A Wrinkle in Time”—that I’m eagerly anticipating), and it has resulted in a drastic shift in the business and the art of filmmaking. Working with independent producers who provide financing outside of studio structures, most of the best Hollywood directors have become, in effect, Off Hollywood filmmakers, working on much lower budgets but with much more creative freedom. As a result, the best of Hollywood and the best of independent filmmaking have, in recent years, converged—note the frequent similarity of the Oscars and such independent-film awards as the Gothams and the Independent Spirits, and the rise of such films as “Moonlight” and “Boyhood” on the grand stage.

It’s worth looking in detail at one of the best movies of 2017, “Lady Bird,” to see how that redefinition works, and how it relates to the changing art of direction. When I wrote about “Lady Bird,” a movie that has one of its emotional anchors in the protagonist’s bond to her home town of Sacramento, I expressed surprise that it didn’t feature more scenes of the characters simply walking through Sacramento—the film seemed shaped to fit the dialogue rather than the entire spectrum of experience that it evokes. A subsequent account of the production, in The Hollywood Reporter, offered some clues, explaining that the film’s budget—“nearly $10 million in financing, thanks to Barry Diller’s IAC”—wasn’t sufficient to shoot on location in Sacramento, so Gerwig primarily “used L.A.’s outskirts as stand-ins.”

This detail illuminates a significant distinction between “Lady Bird” and a wide range of notable independent films. I’ve seen some remarkable movies, made with half, a tenth, or even a hundredth the budget of “Lady Bird,” that have put their actors on location and integrated locale into drama; their creators devise makeshift production structures that allow them, with limited equipment, tight schedules, and small crews, a comprehensive form of originality. But, for “Lady Bird,” Gerwig, making her first feature as sole writer and director, worked nearly like a Hollywood filmmaker. She worked within an existing production structure, infusing it with her own script and cast, her own ideas and experiences and emotions, but yielding to its built-in limits regarding the practical side of things, and I think that her talents as a director were somewhat inhibited as a result.

In some sense, however, Gerwig’s achievement is all the more remarkable: she managed to make a personal film while wrestling with the large organization of a near-Hollywood shoot, complete with stars (and the complications that come with them), and to make a period piece, complete with costumes and sets, on that budget, and to make it deftly, with a unity of tone, as well as including several scenes that are among the most effective, most affecting, of any film this year. I’m a fan of “Lady Bird”; it’s certainly one of the year’s best movies, but its virtues are, in significant measure, classical: it’s a triumph of production, of a strong system helping a filmmaker to contour personal substance into a popular form. I consider David Lowery’s film “A Ghost Story”—my Best Director pick of the year—more original in its mode of production, more exquisite and audacious in its moment-by-moment creations.