Final Best Director Oscar Nomination Predictions

With the Academy’s nominations announcement drawing closer by the day, it’s time to lay it all on the line with my final Oscar nomination predictions. From the outset of awards season, it was certain a female filmmaker would be nominated for Best Director. And that director was undoubtedly Nomadland‘s Chloé Zhao. Now that she’s won over 40 awards from the critics groups, earned nominations from DGA and BAFTA, and won at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards, Zhao is all but unstoppable on her way to becoming the second female filmmaker in history to win Best Director.

But as the season has progressed, it started to look like Zhao may not be the only female filmmaker nominated this year, which would be a first at the Oscars. And there’s even a chance the Academy may follow the lead of the HFPA and nominate three female directors in Zhao, Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman, and Regina King for One Night in Miami. I want to believe this will happen, but I think it’s more likely either Fennell or King will join Zhao in the final five. But which one will it be?

King has the pedigree and industry love from her acting career. She’s won an Oscar for If Beale Street Could Talk and four Primetime Emmy Awards from five nominations. But the fact King only managed a DGA nomination for First-Time Feature and not their main category for Theatrical Feature Film may suggest the Academy will follow suit. Fennell scored a nomination from DGA for Theatrical Feature Film, which was a huge signal she could be the second female in the Oscars line-up. Promising Young Woman has only grown in strength as the season has progressed and a nod for Fennell now seems more likely than one for King.

With nominations from DGA, BAFTA, and Critics Choice, Lee Isaac Chung is now safely inside the top five and will hopefully join Zhao as the first Asian-American filmmakers nominated for Best Director. Unlike Zhao and Fennell, Chung is missing a nod from the Golden Globes. But we know how poorly the HFPA handled Minari, so it was clearly just a minor blip in his campaign.

That leaves the final two spots open and it would appear they are reserved for DGA nominees David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, right? There’s just one slight problem – the five DGA nominees haven’t match the five Oscar nominees since 2009. We’re more likely to see four of the DGA line-up at the Oscars, so who misses out? Fincher and Sorkin were both absent from the BAFTA nominations, so that doesn’t help. Fincher has the directorial pedigree Sorkin lacks. He’s been nominated at the Oscars twice and perhaps that’s enough to secure his third nomination. But Sorkin has greater Best Picture potential for his film than Fincher and maybe that’s the deciding factor.

Heck, maybe they both miss out and make room for King and another contender like Darius Marder for Sound of Metal, Paul Greengrass for News of the World, or even something as left-field as Thomas Vinterberg for Another Round. The latter would follow similar surprise nominations for international filmmakers like Paweł Pawlikowski for Cold War in 2018, Michael Haneke for Amour in 2012, and Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007. Like Vinterberg, all three weren’t DGA nominees, so it’s a strong possibility.

The safe option here is to stick with the DGA five and expect to score four out of five on your predictions ballot. Playing it safe is for suckers, so I’ll go down the path of Sorkin being the Ben Affleck/Bradley Cooper/Kathryn Bigelow of this season and his place instead goes to Marder. I’d love to see King make it in, but I have little faith the Academy would be so progressive to nominate three female filmmakers in the same year. Sound of Metal has seen a surge in strength in recent weeks and perhaps that will be enough to push Marder into the top five.

BEST DIRECTOR PREDICTIONS:
1. Chloé Zhao – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
2. Lee Isaac Chung – Minari (A24)
3. Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
4. David Fincher – Mank (Netflix)
5. Darius Marder – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)

Alternate: Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)