2025 Oscars – Best Director: The Substance Should Be Nominated

Coralie Fargeat has made one of the best-directed films of the year with The Substance. She’s easily one of the best female directors working today, but even without the gender stipulation. There are others that I would put in this category” Greta Gerwig, Emerald Fennell, Jennifer Kent, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Chloe Zhao, and Sofia Coppola are among the best women behind the camera. I’m sure there are others not on the tip of my tongue but those are the ones that spring to mind.

How do I judge a female director, or any director’s worth? Their visual style, how they set up shots, how they invent a world through the frame. It has to do with composition, color choice, editing and yes, how they direct the actors.

Fargeat’s The Substance is, for me, next level in terms of what I’ve seen women do behind the camera. Maybe that’s because she’s learned from the best, and it’s obvious in every frame of her film. She references Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Lolita. She references John Carpenter’s The Thing, Brian De Palma’s Carrie. There’s David Cronenberg in there and there is David Lynch with The Elephant Man. She also has Hitchcock’s Psycho AND Vertigo. It’s a movie made by someone who loves movies.

But it’s also most definitely made by a woman and I’m not sure it’s possible to fully understand this movie if you are not an OLDER woman. She’s younger than me by ten years, but she’s old enough to KNOW what all of us women know as we age. It’s in every frame of this strange, ugly, beautiful, wild, undisciplined, and unforgettable film.

What I think about this movie is different from what I believe the Oscar voters will think of this movie. For that, you have to dumb it way, way down. I don’t mean the Academy members are dumb. I mean, any consensus is always held to the lowest common denominator. A consensus vote can account for a pretty good movie, sometimes even a great movie. But movies like The Substance are usually ignored by the Academy but talked about for decades, whether the Academy will nominate them or not. Take Gone Girl, for instance.

The Substance, like Anora, is LOUD. But loud cuts through the noise of our modern world cluttered with content everywhere we look. It’s TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, social media, etc. To get anyone’s attention now, a movie has to be loud enough to stand out. But it also has to be watchable. I thought Damien Chazelle’s Babylon was a good effort. It was loud but it wasn’t really watchable, not like The Substance.

For starters, both Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore are fantastic in their parts. They know exactly what is required of them and they deliver. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed two performances more than these two. Demi Moore has never been better. Never. She’s game for all of the most bizarre, grotesque, obscene, humiliating scenes Fargeat puts her through. She goes along with all of it even at the very end.

The Elephant Man is in this movie too, believe it or not, and your heart breaks just the same. Trust me, women KNOW. They KNOW what that last scene is about. They know about the fear, the agony, the self-hate. They know about the boobs – the BOOBS. They know about the food, the smile, the unexpected tragedies that come along with always having to look pretty.

Hats off to Fargeat for this movie, honestly. And she absolutely directs the shit out of this thing and deserves to be nominated over probably most of the films this year.

Who is leading in the Best Director race?

The Oscars are a weird game. They are ruled mainly by publicists who more or less influence the bloggers and those who do the “predicting.” In one sense, people might think the predictions come from the best films of the year but really, they don’t. They are carefully curated from a selection offered up by the studios that bloggers then more or less confirm.

That’s how the game is played, or rigged, or however you wish to see it. This is how that consensus has decided the Best Director race should go — not necessarily in this order:

Anora
The Brutalist
Conclave
Emilia Perez
Gladiator II

That is more or less what Clarence Moye has over at The Contending, but it also represents the general consensus at this stage. I can’t really argue with it. At least four of those will be locked in whether they deserve it or not. It’s just what everyone has agreed upon will likely be chosen.

The first major award for Best Director is at the Golden Globes. They have six slots now, which makes predicting for them easier but for the Directors Guild and the Oscars harder, since they only have five. This is what the Best Director gauntlet looked like the last three years:

As you can see, director is the path to Best Picture. In the past three years, all Best Picture nominees had a Best Director nomination from either the Globes, the Critics Choice, the DGA or the BAFTA. Because there are so many international voters in the Academy, the BAFTA has outsized influence on the directing brance, as we can see from Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer last year.

There is a chance that voters might want to honor a female director in what will be an all-male lineup, but that consensus will have to start early. Only one pundit at Gold Derby now has Fargeat and that’s Greg Ellwood. But that doesn’t mean anything. They’re leaning into the consensus over there rather than making bold moves. Most of the pundits at Gold Derby pick what everyone else is predicting. When they select their predictions they see on the left side of the screen the most popular predictions by other pundits.

When you do that, it’s much harder to think for yourself. I know because I was a member of that site for years. It’s nearly impossible to resist what you see at the top. So you tend to lean in to the consensus, which is a powerful force.

First, the Globes, then the Critics Choice, then the Directors Guild, then the BAFTA – by the end of it, the consensus is mostly locked in except for a name or two here or there. The DGA is often different from the Oscar branch for Best Director.

The DGA has 15,000+ members, where the Best Director branch has just 500 hundred or so. The DGA tends to reflect the popular choice but since Hollywood has flatlined, the box office is a ghost town, and the Oscar race has never more insular than it is right now, it’s tough to say what five movies they will choose.

I expect that these films seem safe for a DGA nod:

Anora
Dune
Gladiator II

And probably:
Conclave

Maybe:
Saturday Night
Emilia Perez

Usually, the DGA names the top Best Picture contenders of the year. They tend to go for the bigger names. This time, that would be Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve, Sean Baker. That is why I think Jason Reitman has a shot, but Audiard might not, considering he’s not as well known. Maybe. Netflix might make award season an offer it can’t refuse and it will be among the top five.

But it’s just too soon to know, given that so many of the “big” movies we all thought might dominate this race sank like a stone. Now, we start from scratch from a much shorter and smaller pile. Kris Tapley said on Twitter yesterday that he thought Furiosa was the best film so far. So why not Furiosa? Maybe because of the box office. The film took a major loss and doesn’t seem so popular because of that.

By contrast, Dune Part Two is one of the few hits of the year, along with Gladiator II (most likely). In a different kind of year, this would be the time to ram through Inside Out 2 into the Best Picture ten. Why not? Why not choose the highest-grossing film of the year (unless Gladiator II tops it):

I don’t think Coralie Fargeat should be nominated because she’s a woman. There are other women who could get in, like Payal Kapadia, the director of All We Imagine as Light. But Fargeat should get in because, in all likelihood, The Substance will among the only films released this year that people will be talking about for the next ten, maybe twenty years.

Sometimes the critics can inject a name or a title that can completely shift the race in a certain direction. For instance, if the New York Film Critics chose Coralie Fargeat, she would have a much better chance at getting a nomination. Now she’s part of the consensus. But if that never happens, even if a few people put her down on their ballots, she won’t be at the top, which is why it’s become so easy to predict the Oscars now because we’re not really predicting them; we’re building them.

Here is how I currently rate the Best Directors this year – not necessarily how I would predict this race, because that bounces off the consensus but this isn’t the consensus. It’s how I see their position in the real world versus the world of bloggers: