Welcome to a new generation of filmmakers! For the first time since I can't even remember when, all five of the names in this category are first-time nominees. None of the salty veterans or previous winners in this category either made films in 2024 or made anything that attracted the Directors Branch voters. No Spielberg or Scorsese, no Nolan or Fincher, no Paul Thomas Anderson or the Coen Brothers, no Clint Eastwood or Ridley Scott, not even a Cuarón, Iñárritu, or Guillermo del Toro to be found.
New blood!
Four of the five mimic the DGA Award nominees.
Coralie Fargeat is the odd duck out, with Edward Berger (
Conclave) taking her spot at the DGA. Her first U.S. production was a smash. Pre-
Substance, Coraline had made a couple of well-regarded genre pieces in France: the clever Sci-Fi short
Reality+ (2014) and the ultra-bloody feature
Revenge (2017). The Academy doesn't go too much for Horror flicks, but they are more likely to praise them when wrapped in satire and humor, as with Jordan Peele's
Get Out. Fargeat's gross and shiny
The Substance has elements of and nods to Cronenberg and Kubrick, but coupled with the cheeky look at Hollywood stardom and beauty standards it was too much for the Oscar voters to resist activating, netting five big nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Original Screenplay and Director nods for Fargeat.
After infamously having only two women nominated in this category for decades - Lina Wertmüller for
Seven Beauties (1976) and Jane Campion for
The Piano (1993) the lonely pair in the entire 20th Century – Fargeat is now the ninth woman historically to make the cut and the fifth this decade (Chloé Zhao, Emerald Fennell, Jane Campion, and last year’s Justine Triet). She won’t join Zhao and Campion as winners, but she is a dynamic new voice in the mix. Her next project will surely get lots of attention and likely an increased budget, whether it is deemed Oscar-worthy or not.
Jacques Audiard is also French.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), a remake of James Toback’s’70s cult classic
Fingers, brought his first international arthouse attention, while his prison flick
A Prophet (2009) was nominated for Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film (losing to Argentina’s
The Secret in Their Eyes).
The Sisters Brothers (2018) with Joaquin Phoenix & John C. Reilly was his first English speaking production. His insane French/Spanish Musical parable
Emilia Pérez has turned into an unlikely Oscar machine: an astounding THIRTEEN nominations, including both Best Picture and Best International Feature for this over-the-top tale of a Mexican drug cartel kingpin who wants to disappear from that life and transition to a woman. And did I mention it is also a Musical? Can this bold fable win Audiard Best Director? I honestly wouldn’t have thought it would have even be nominated, so who knows?
At age 61,
James Mangold is the old-timer in the mix this year. Though this is his first nomination as Best Director - one of three nods this year for
A Complete Unknown where he's also been acknowledged for Adapted Screenplay and as one of the producers for Best Picture – previously he had an Adapted Screenplay nod as the co-writer of
Logan (2017) when
Call Me By Your Name won and for producing Best Picture nominee
Ford v Ferrari (2019) the year
Parasite won. His second feature ever,
CopLand (1997), probably should have had a bag full of nominations back in the day, and as a director he has seen two performances win Oscars, being Angelina Jolie’s Best Supporting Actress for
Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Reese Witherspoon’s Best Actress for
Walk the Line (2005). This year’s Robert Zimmerman Musical Biopic may get Mr. Chalamet his first Oscar, but Mangold won’t get one here. Thus far in his career he tends to bounce between prestige projects and blockbusters, so the odds are he’ll be back again at some point. After Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who is the next logical music icon for a subject? Leonard Cohen? Only the Jazz Police know for sure.
The craft services budget on Mangold’s
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was likely more than the full budgets of
Sean Baker’s first seven features. Combined. Baker’s first breakout came with
Tangerine (2015), famously filmed via iPhone. His follow-up
The Florida Project (2017) got even more attention and an Oscar nomination for Willem Dafoe.
Red Rocket (2021) continued his ascension which led to
Anora’s $6-million budget and now
six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture! The recognition moving quickly from Cannes and the Independent Film world to this kind of Oscar profile is impressive.
Anora’s tale of a marriage between a sex worker and a Russian oligarch’s wayward kid ain’t
Pretty Woman, and seems unlikely to get enough support to actually win, though it is great that a talent like Baker’s has been noticed by the Academy. Whether his sensibility and Oscar’s ever match up again, time will tell, and maybe Sean has some big budget tale he has been yearning to tell with the proper backing, but good on them for acknowledging one of the most talented directors in recent years.
Which leaves
Brady Corbet. You may recognize him from his younger days as an actor, in the likes of Catherine Hardwicke’s
Thirteen (2003), Gregg Araki’s
Mysterious Skin (2004), Michael Haneke’s remake of his own
Funny Games (2007), Sean Durkins’
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), Lars Von Trier’s
Melancholia (2011), and Olivier Assayas’
Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). An impressive body of work. But, as they say, he always wanted to direct. His feature debut
The Childhood of a Leader (2015) was an ambitious adaptation of a Jean-Paul Sartre short story starring Robert Pattinson and Bérénice Bejo and his follow-up
Vox Lux (2018), a tough piece about terrorism and pop music starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. But those don’t really clue you in to the leap he took in storytelling scope with
The Brutalist, an intense and unflinching four-hour epic now up for ten Academy Awards! It certainly feels “Oscar-y”, but on the heels of last year’s Best Picture and Best Director wins for
Oppenheimer will the voters move towards a different kind of less ponderous movie this year?
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