The Film Experience

Team Experience is discussing each Oscar category before the nominations come out. Here's Eric Blume and Glenn Dunks to talk Best Director...

ERIC: Hi Glenn, excited to dive into this year's crop of Best Directors with you. To me, the big question is whether all three of the "big gun pictures" will carry their directors to nominations. That's Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon; Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer; and Greta Gerwig for Barbie. I personally can't get too excited about Nolan or Scorsese, even though they both do expert work but nothing that rattled my cage. I think one of Gerwig's biggest achievements directing that film...and this is no easy feat...was dealing with what must have been BINDERS of notes from Mattell and Warner Bros and still delivering the film she set out to make...

Do you think these three are definite locks, and what are your thoughts on the three of them?

GLENN: Welcome to another Oscar season, Eric. I was mulling over your question and trying to land on what this year's director race reminds me of and it wasn't too long before it clicked. 2012. Remember that? When two of the frontrunners—Ben Affleck for eventual Best Picture winner Argo, and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty—got given the boot for smaller works by Benh Zeitlin and Michael Haneke. It was a shocker on nomination morning.

I'm still confident on Nolan and Scorsese out of sheer logic, but I do fear our dear Greta is on the path to a surprise omission. I don't necessarily begrudge it, particularly if Justine Triet can make it in. And although I have yet to see the films, Greta Lee and Jonathan Glazer seem like further logical beneficiaries of the director branch's expanded diversity. The field seems both very compact around certain titles and yet wide open for major surprises.

Are there any ways you see this race unfolding that would make for some major shocks?

ERIC: Glenn, I couldn't agree more. I remember that shocker morning a decade ago. The Director branch tends to have smarter, more refined taste than a lot of the other nominating committees, and I agree that we are likely to see some surprises. I guess you're right that Nolan and Scorsese will make the cut at end of day, but I do think there's a window where Scorsese is a surprise miss. FWIW, I haven't talked to anyone here in LA who is particularly excited about Flower Moon, and the praise for it seems more respectful than passionate. And directors are all about passion. One other thing the directors really factor into their voting is budgets. Scorsese basically had a open check to work with on his film, so the other directors know that he didn't exactly need to be scrappy and resourceful. Hence the nominations for Haneke and Zeitlin back in the day...directors who really delivered while working with no money.

Greta is a curious case, and she could indeed go either way. I think the branch will be impressed with how she navigated through the corporate waters to still deliver a "personal" film, but it's still a very glossy film that some might find too commercial?

I think Glazer is definitely in for The Zone of Interest, just as I felt super confident last year that Todd Field would make it in for TÁR. Directors LOVE control, especially the kind of masterful control that Glazer has here, resisting all urges to move any of the actors' faces into even a medium shot, and never abandoning a metallic, antiseptic atmosphere full of purposefully banal compositions. Glazer picks a lane and NEVER veers from it. He certainly must have had moments where he felt like "let's make at least this one shot beautifully framed"...but he never indulges, and he keeps things so clinical and ugly and distanced throughout. The directors will understand that kind of achievement.

And I think Yorgos Lanthimos is surely in as well. After The Favourite, he's in the club, and at this point, all the directors are eagerly awaiting his next film. Poor Things is that kind of singular achievement that nobody else could have dreamed of making in that way, the movie that makes other directors jealous. Lanthimos somehow makes Poor Things take place in the past, the future, and in some timeless vacuum all at the same time, and he lets all of his actors soar. The combination of his visual imagination, technical acumen, and the work he does with Emma Stone should surely land him safely in this race. I personally think his work is more dynamic, interesting, and deep that Nolan and Scorsese's combined.

What do you think, Glenn? Am I out of my mind thinking Glazer and Lanthimos are sure bets?

GLENN: Yes, well, a list made up of Gerwig, Glazer, Lanthimos Nolan and Scorsese appears to be the most logical at this stage. Lanthimos has become something of an unexpected awards season favourite and the audaciousness of Poor Things' vision will, I think, get him over the line (although I am not a fan of it). Meanwhile, Glazer does strike me as getting some benefit from being British making a German-language film in an expanded Academy—but did it leave its run too late for a film that really requires the viewer to sit and contemplate it.

But a month out from nomination morning and I just have to stop and think about what's going to be on the top of the screener pile over Christmas that could really get the branch going. Which is why I keep coming back to Celine Song, whose film is small but unlike anything else among the contenders. Or the director of my number one movie of the year, perhaps Justine Triet whose masterful fusion of Euro-intellectualism with the mainstream hook of a courtroom thriller might be an even better choice for the branch, which obviously leans very American but not as American as before.

Or could the warm-and-fuzzies provided by Alexander Payne's Christmas-themed The Holdovers get him across the line again?

Before we go into our final predix, I'd love to know which outside-the-box (or at least outside-the-main-contenders-that-we've-mentioned) contender you wish could make us all stand up and shout on nomination morning. I would love nothing more than for Todd Haynes to land his very first directing nomination. I also thought it would be wild for the branch to give a giant f-u to awards season precursors and nominate Wes Anderson for Asteroid City. What a wild choice that would be!

My predictions:

Greta Gerwig, BARBIE
Yorgos Lanthimos, POOR THINGS
Christopher Nolan, OPPENHEIMER
Martin Scorsese, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Celine Song, PAST LIVES

ERIC: Glenn, it's interesting that you and I are both largely thinking the same nominees, outside of your confidence in Strong and mine in Glazer. That's why I hope we are ripe for some upsets on nomination morning.

Todd Haynes sits in sixth-place likelihood to me. Again, May December is the kind of movie not only where directors will "get" what Todd Haynes is doing, but realize that ONLY Todd Haynes could have delivered it exactly in that form. Haynes somehow is working on at least four or five tonal levels throughout the picture, but in masterful ways, not by mistake. He also gets two shattering career performances from his skilled actresses (Portman and Moore) and directs an inexperienced actor (Melton) so skillfully that he almost steals the picture from them. Haynes is a genuine original in the category most likely to celebrate genuine originals. Directors are jealous of this film...they couldn't have landed this plane. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see him finally make the slate this year.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Alexander Payne in there either...it's really caught on in these past weeks, and they've nominated him for far less successful work.

Haynes, Song, and Justine Triet are the underdogs I'm rooting for (I'd swap out Nolan, Scorsese, and Gerwig for them). And I have enormous respect for what Andrew Haigh swings for with All of Us Strangers. He's telling a metaphysical and purely metaphorical story in a medium not inviting to those styles, and the language he's using to tell it is extraordinarily sophisticated.

But end of day, I’ll second your nominees, swapping out Celine Song for Jonathan Glazer. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, like you said, we had some shocks like back in 2012!