As stated in last week’s post, it’s best to simply discuss what *could* happen this year regarding narrative or films that could take over the Oscar race, rather than explicitly stating what will occur. This early in the season, hardly anyone really knows anything about what will happen, but that’s part of the reason it all somehow works when one puts it together.
Best Director, as a category, is still, to this day, one of the hardest to define. For many, it’s possible to look at a film, consider its direction flawless, and believe there was some other film that was better than it. Filmmaking is a director’s medium, and recently, as evidenced by the Best Picture winners, the director is becoming a precursor to whatever takes Best Picture, and one could make the argument that it’s the reverse argument, too.
When Bong-Joon Ho prevailed over Sam Mendes for Best Director six years ago, an upset many consider to be one of the last truly surprising above the line Oscar results, many believe that it was a sign of not only how strong Parasite truly was, but how correlated Bong’s act as director was to the film succeeding, prevailing over a technical achievement like 1917.
This decade, with the exception of CODA (and even in this year, Campion’s The Power of the Dog was partly favored to win Best Picture for so long because of her narrative in the category), every film that has won Best Picture has also won Director. Chloé Zhao, the Daniels, Nolan, Baker, and, most recently, PTA have all defined the Oscar race through narratives shaped by their visionary perspectives and storylines. When making their Director chart, it seems fairly important to consider.
Rather than explain one by one who could win the Director, it’s probably best to list as many as one can.
1. Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine
2. Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey
3. Tom Ford, Cry to Heaven
4. Cristian Mungiu, Fjord
5. Paweł Pawlikowski, Fatherland (formerly known as 1949)
6. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger
7. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Project Hail Mary
8. Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Three
9. Greta Gerwig, Narnia
10. Steven Spielberg, Disclosure Day
11. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, All of a Sudden
12. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Look Back or Sheep In The Box
13. Alice Birch, Sweetsick
14. Jesse Eisenberg, Untitled Musical Comedy
15. Danny Boyle, Ink
16. Aaron Sorkin, The Social Reckoning
17. Antoine Fuqua, Michael
18. Joel Coen, Jack of Spades
19. Robert Eggers, Werwulf
20. Jim Rash, Miss You, Love You
For the record, here are the top twenty that the Award Expert Community considers for the category (apologize for the formatting, but it needed to be in three separate pictures)
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