Forget About Best Picture, This Year’s Best Director Winner Will Continue an Even More Exciting Oscar Trend
The ceremony has been long slammed for a similar problem in other categories, and the Academy might have taken notes.
The last in the long line of prestigious ceremonies during Hollywood’s annual awards season, the Oscars is usually quite an easy piece to decipher long before the Academy announces the winners, yet this year’s ceremony might be the most incalculable (and scandalous) in recent years.
The overall excitement ahead of the big night is still fuelled by the lasting aftertaste of Oscar-related scandals like Emilia Pérez’s multiple controversies and The Brutalist’s revealed AI use.
However, even with the ongoing drama in other major categories, this year’s Best Director nominees might be one of few positive and very promising moments that keeps the Oscars’ great trend alive years later.
This Year’s Best Director Will Become First-Time Oscar Winner
Despite many controversies that the Academy faces every year, this time the ceremony will once again give a boost to the career of one of the nominated directors by giving the ultimate winner their first ever statuette.
The race for the award currently has Emilia Pérez’s Jacques Audiard, Anora’s Sean Baker, The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, The Substance’s Coralie Fargeat and A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold competing, with Baker and Corbet still considered the frontrunners.
However, even if the stars don’t align for either of them, the Oscar will go to a first-time winner whatsoever, since neither of the nominees has ever received the award before.
This year’s ceremony will mark the first time when all of Best Director contenders are also first-timers since 1998, while the streak itself was actually started by Bong Joon-ho back in 2020 after he won his first ever Oscar in the Best Director category for his hit movie Parasite.
Sean Baker Still Has Better Chances to Win Best Director
Even though it might arguably be not the best movie presented in the Best Picture category, Anora gave a major uplifting to Sean Baker’s possibility to win Best Director after all.
A couple of months ago considered a very unlikely flick to receive the awards in the most important categories, Anora has easily swept most of other prestigious awards, taking home statuettes for Best Picture and Best Director too.
As The Hollywood Reporter recently stated in its own Oscar bets, Baker is a much more likely winner than Corbet due to the former’s overall fame and acclaimed position in the modern cinema.
The Oscar winners will be announced on March 2.