Joel and Ethan Coen are filmmakers from Minnesota. Their films include Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, The Ladykillers, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski and Fargo. Between them, they have over 50 awards and 70 nominations, including several Oscars. Before The Ladykillers, the brothers were typically credited as producer and director, with Joel directing and Ethan producing. Since that time, both brothers have been credited as co-directors. According to the Sunday Times, the brothers are often referred to as the "two-headed director" and any actor needing to ask a question can ask it of either brother, and likely receive the same answer.

The Coen brothers are also known for casting many of the same actors in their movies, including George Clooney, John Turturro, Michael Badalucco, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand, John Goodman and Stephen Root.

The directors are famous for incorporating several different techniques in each one of their films, such as rushing the camera forward, story-boarding the entire film in advance, using different lenses, colour-correcting for different effects and utilizing different camera angles to hide or emphasize certain things. http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3549

The Coen Brothers have been nominated for ten Academy Awards total and have won four Academy Awards as a pair. They won four Academy Awards for No Country for Old Men in 2007, and Joel Coen won two Academy Awards for Fargo in 1996.

In 1996 Joel and Ethan Coen gave an acceptance speech after winning the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. In 2008, both brothers gave acceptance speeches when they won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. During the acceptance speech for Best Picture, Scott Rudin spoke instead.

The Coen Brothers are nominated for Best Original Screenplay for A Serious Man.

From Oscars.org

• Ethan Coen:
• I don't have a lot to add to what I said earlier. Thank you.
• Joel Coen:
• Ethan and I have been making stories with movie cameras since we were kids. In the late '60s when Ethan was 11 or 12, he got a suit and a briefcase and we went to the Minneapolis International Airport with a Super 8 camera and made a movie about shuttle diplomacy called "Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go." And honestly, what we do now doesn't feel that much different from what we were doing then. There are too many people to thank for this. We're really thrilled to have received it, and we're very thankful to all of you out there for letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox, so thank you very much.

Thank you very much for this. Thank you Scott Rudin for bringing us the novel and giving us a chance to make this movie. Whatever success we've had in this area is entirely attributable to how selective we are. We've only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy. Thank you.

• Thank you very much.

• Joel Coen

Well, I'd like to thank Michael Kuhn at Polygram and Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner at Working Title, everyone at Working Title, for reading the script and making it into a movie. I'd like to thank everyone who worked on the movie, everyone over at Mary Zophres' house. I guess this woke you guys up. And mostly I'd like to thank Frances without whom the part wouldn't have been written, the movie wouldn't have been made, and we wouldn't be standing here.

• Ethan Coen

I'd like to thank those people, Roger Deakins and John Cameron as well, everybody else who worked on the movie. And I'd also like to congratulate the other nominees in this category, and Billy Bob [and] the other nominees in that category as well. It really is nice company. Thank you.