The Best Director Oscar Race May Be a Lot More Competitive Than We Think

The DGA Awards will clear up who the Best Director frontrunner is, but there is a path for every Oscar nominee to win.

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In an effort to not sound too much like a broken record, rather than write another screed entirely focused on the Oscar for Best Picture going to either “One Battle After Another” or “Sinners,” I thought it would be fun to make the case for why every Best Director contender could win. After all, anyone who is nominated still has a chance. More importantly, all five nominees made films that are also nominated for Best Picture, so there is no one to even write off on that front.

The person that I think has the best odds at winning is whichever director wins the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film category at the upcoming DGA Awards on Saturday, February 7. My current prediction as to who that person will be? “Sinners” director Ryan Coogler.

“Sinners” made history by receiving the most Oscar nominations of any film ever, a clear indication that multiple branches within the Academy have watched and appreciated the film. But those noms also again brought up the fact that the Academy has still never awarded a Black filmmaker Best Director, now for 97 ceremonies running.

What better moment to award a director who has clearly shown they are operating on the highest level of craft, with their film being recognized for everything from its costume design, to its score, to its visual effects? Yet the ethos behind the film is also something Coogler’s peers can appreciate, as the core of “Sinners” is about protecting one’s art and culture from exploitation. 

And the major box office success of the film proved that there is an audience demand for more original IP and films shot on premium formats. That’s likely to put it in even more favor with director peers, as it opens up the door to them also producing their original scripts and/or shooting on film formats that studios were more resistant to a couple years ago. The president of the Directors Guild of America Christopher Nolan, who led a similar charge with “Oppenheimer,” also happens to be a close friend of Coogler’s, and even moderated a For Your Consideration event with the “Sinners” director prior to Oscar and DGA nominations. 

As we have said time and time again as we cover this year’s Oscar contenders, Coogler’s greatest competition for both the DGA Award and the Best Director Oscar is Paul Thomas Anderson, who made fellow Warner Bros. Pictures release “One Battle After Another.” On the Oscars front, Anderson has been nominated 11 times, and not won once. The three prior films he’s made that were nominated for Best Picture also earned him a Best Director nomination. His track record with the DGA is even less than that, as he was nominated by the guild for “There Will Be Blood” and “Licorice Pizza,” but not “Phantom Thread.”

To be clear, Anderson definitely still has a huge chance at winning the DGA Award, as “One Battle After Another” has long been seen as the Best Picture frontrunner, and more often than not the DGA winner directed the film that goes onto win that Oscar category. Though his film is a loose adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, his Best Director campaign hits on a lot of similar points that Coogler’s does, in the sense that he’s had a consistent string of his films nominated for Oscars, and for him to be one of the most influential directors of this century to go unrecognized by both awards bodies is a bit of an outrage.

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