Best Director: Who Could Be In Contention?

Never won a Directing Oscar: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Kurosawa, Lynch, PTA, Chaplin, Tarantino, Cronenberg, Malick, Fellini, Bergman, Varda, Leone, Fincher, Altman, Hawks, Lumet, Campion, Herzog, Scott, Gilliam, Preminger, Cassavetes, Lang— It’s all meaningless, folks.

And yet, it’s always fun to speculate way ahead of time when it comes to the Best Director category. Why? Because we want the best filmmakers to win so that they have more freedom to make more movies. It’s as simple as that.

This site is also one primarily focused on the auteur. That’s our bread and butter, what distinguishes us from the other movie-related sites. We celebrate “the director.”

Back to the Oscar race, I’ve painstakingly tried to decipher through many of the question marks for this year’s fall crop of contenders. We know, for the most part, who is in and who is out. The only big movies we’re still not entirely sure of are Ari Aster’s “Disappointment Blvd” and David Fincher’s “The Killer.”

With that being said, I’m keeping a close eye out on these eleven filmmakers (how could you not?)

Steven Spielberg (The Fablemans)
Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Damien Chazelle (Babylon)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Bardo)
Noah Baumbach (White Noise)

Darren Aronofsky (The Whale)
Andrew Dominik (Blonde)
Todd Field (TAR)
Florian Zeller (The Son)
Sarah Polley (Women Talking)
Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin)

Maria Schrader (She Said)
Paul Schrader (The Master Gardener)
Tobias Lindholm (The Good Nurse)
George C. Wolfe (Rustin)
Sebastián Lelio (The Wonder)

EDIT: I forgot to include Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” and, I guess, James Cameron’s “Avatar 2.”

For now, I’m sticking with these. This list will likely change once films actually start screening at Venice/Telluride/Toronto.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All At Once) will also be in the conversation. But also how about Audrey Diwan (Happening)? Her film is now the most topical of the 2022 US release calendar. I’ll talk more about that movie later this week.

Then there’s the “Cannes slot” which occurs every few years. This year, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave) might sneak in there, although I’m very skeptical about his film going far. More realistically, Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund (Triangle Sadness) is gaining buzz — the film was just screened for New York critics. Another Swede, Lukas Dhont (Close), might have the best chance as he directed a film that completely adheres to the Academy’s film sensibilities.

Of course, the sad tradition of not honoring the right filmmakers could very well continue for the Academy in 2023. Originality can sometimes be so profoundly perplexing that it scares voters away. The right person almost never wins. It takes time to comprehend and acknowledge how some were just completely ahead of their time.