It’s all first-time nominees for the Best Director Oscar — for the first time in 27 years
All five Academy Award nominees for Best Director on Thursday — Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, Sean Baker for Anora, Jacques Audiard for Emilia Pérez, James Mangold for A Complete Unknown, and Coralie Fargeat for The Substance — are first-timers in the category.
The last time the Best Directors list was all first-timers was 1998, when James Cameron (Titanic), Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting), Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), and Peter Weir (The Truman Show) were honored. That was the year that Cameron went on to personally win three Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Editing in addition to directing as part of Titanic’s massive 11-victory haul.
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Too, Fargeat joined an exclusive club on Thursday, becoming just the ninth woman to be nominated in the Best Director category. The other eight were Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties, 1977), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2004)), Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993, and The Power of the Dog, 2022), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, 2010), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, 2018), Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, 2021), Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, 2021), and Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall, 2024). Of those, Bigelow, Zhao, and Campion (in ’22) went on to win the Oscar.
Mangold, it should be noted, was nominated for Oscars twice before — Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018 for Logan and Best Picture in 2018 for Ford v Ferrari — but never for directing. Corbet won the Golden Globe for Best Director early this month. He is nominated for both the DGA Award and BAFTA in addition to the Oscar, as are Audiard, Baker, and Berger.
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The Substance — for which Fargeat received her directorial nomination — is a body-horror film starring Demi Moore as a fading movie star named Elisabeth Sparkle who uses a black market drug to create a younger version of herself and become relevant again — with unexpected side effects. Fargeat wrote and produced as well as directed the project, which also features Margaret Qualley as Sue, a younger version of Elisabeth, and Dennis Quaid as Harvey, an uber-masculine TV exec.
Berger, who was snubbed in the directorial category two years ago for All Quiet on the Western Front, was snubbed again this time as well for Conclave. He told Gold Derby in an interview in December, “You never know. You sit on the set and you keep shooting, and constantly you ask yourself, ‘Is this going to be interesting? Are audiences going to respond to this? Am I doing everything right? What am I forgetting? What am I doing wrong? And so there’s no recipe, and you never know how it’ll come out, and how audiences will feel. You make might make the greatest movie, and no one will go see it. It’s such a crapshoot.” Clearly, receiving nominations is a crapshoot as well.
The last 10 winners in the category since 2015 were as follows, in order:
Alejandro G. I?árritu for Birdman
I?árritu for The Revenant
Damien Chazelle for La La Land
Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water
Alfonso Cuarón for Roma
Bong Joon-ho for Parasite
Chloé Zhao for Nomadland
Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once
Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer
Motion Picture Academy members will vote for the winners between Feb. 11 and Feb. 18, and the results will then be tallied by the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The winners in all 23 categories will be revealed during a ceremony on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Conan O’Brien will host the Oscars, which will be telecast on ABC, the ABC app, and abc.com, along with several streaming services.
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