{"id":454772,"date":"2026-02-05T04:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T04:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/454772\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T04:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T04:47:13","slug":"the-best-director-oscar-race-is-a-lot-more-competitive-than-we-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/454772\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Director Oscar Race Is a Lot More Competitive Than We Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of \u201cIndieWire\u2019s The Lead Up<\/a>,\u201d a weekly newsletter in which our Awards<\/a> Editor\u00a0Marcus Jones takes readers on the awards trail, interviewing key figures responsible for some of the most compelling stories of the season, and offering predictions on who will win.\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d or \u201cSinners,\u201d I thought it would be fun to make the case for why every Best Director<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a> \"Fallout<\/a> <\/p>\n

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<\/a> on Saturday, February 7. My current prediction as to who that person will be? \u201cSinners\u201d director Ryan Coogler.<\/p>\n

\u201cSinners\u201d made history by receiving the most Oscar nominations of any film ever<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s peers can appreciate, as the core of \u201cSinners\u201d is about protecting one\u2019s art and culture from exploitation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cOppenheimer,\u201d also happens to be a close friend of Coogler\u2019s, and even moderated a For Your Consideration event with the \u201cSinners\u201d director prior to Oscar and DGA nominations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As we have said time and time again as we cover this year\u2019s Oscar contenders, Coogler\u2019s greatest competition for both the DGA Award and the Best Director Oscar is Paul Thomas Anderson, who made fellow Warner Bros. Pictures release \u201cOne Battle After Another.\u201d On the Oscars<\/a> front, Anderson has been nominated 11 times, and not won once. The three prior films he\u2019s 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 \u201cThere Will Be Blood\u201d and \u201cLicorice Pizza,\u201d but not \u201cPhantom Thread.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be clear, Anderson definitely still has a huge chance at winning the DGA Award, as \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d 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\u2019s does, in the sense that he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Want more on our\u00a02026 Oscar Predictions<\/a>\u00a0and the reasoning behind them?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, IndieWire\u2019s The Lead Up, in which our Awards Editor offers some exclusive musings straight from the awards trail \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of \u201cIndieWire\u2019s The Lead Up,\u201d a weekly newsletter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[3042,186783,49,48,361,75,18744,186784,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-454772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-best-director","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-celebrities","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-oscars","15":"tag-the-lead-up","16":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}